Jocelyn Susan Bell Burnell | Biography

Born in Northern Ireland near Armagh Observatory, Bell Burnell was encouraged by the staff there when they found she was interested in astronomy. She went on to earn a B.Sc. degree in 1965 at the University of Glasgow. Later that year she began to work on her Ph.D. under the supervision of Antony Hewish at Cambridge University. They constructed a new kind of radio telescope designed to track quasars, powerful sources of radio energy extremely far from the Earth. The telescope had the ability to record rapid variations in the strength of the quasars' emissions.

In August 1967 Bell Burnell was working out problems with the new telescope when she picked up strange signals. At first Hewish thought they were products of local ham radio operators or electrical interference. The signals disappeared and reappeared until November, when Bell Burnell used a high-speed recorder to monitor them. The device revealed that they pulsated at a steady interval of just over one second. All other celestial radio sources known until that time emitted a continuous impulse.

The impulses were so regular (every 1.337 seconds) that Bell Burnell and Hewish had to consider whether they might be made by alien beings as some sort of interstellar beacon. They first named the source of the signals LGM 1 (Little Green Men), but within a few months, Bell Burnell located three other similar sources.

Now the problem was to explain these signals as an astronomical phenomenon. In his announcement of the discovery of pulsar s, Hewish tentatively hypothesized that they might be white dwarf stars or neutron stars. By the end of 1968, the locations of two pulsars were pinpointed within supernova remnants, leading astronomers Thomas Gold and Franco Pacini to postulate that pulsars may indeed be collapsed remnants of nova explosions called neutron stars. Such stars, though only 10 miles (16 km) in diameter, are incredibly dense. The whole star and its magnetic field spin at a rapid rate, and the motion of charged particles within the magnetic field produces a narrow beam of radiation that sweeps around like a lighthouse beam as the star spins, creating the characteristic pulsar signal. This explanation is accepted today, and hundreds of pulsars have been catalogued, including many in locations where supernovas are known to have occurred.

In 1974 Antony Hewish received the Nobel Prize in physics for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars. Unfortunately Bell Burnell was not officially recognized by the Nobel committee, but in 1986 she was awarded the American Astronomical Society's Beatrice Tinsley prize, in honor of her significant achivements in astronomy.

Following her discovery of pulsars, Bell Burnell accepted a position at the University of Southampton, where she worked on gamma ray astronomy. She also worked on the British satellite Ariel V at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory until 1982, when she was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Scotland. There she has continued her research on infrared astronomy, optical astronomy, and millimeter wave astronomy.