The Armagh woman who made one of the 20th century’s greatest astronomical discoveries

When Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell “stumbled upon something new” during her doctoral studies at Cambridge University, she was on the verge of making what the Royal Society called “one of the greatest discoveries. 20th century astronomers ”.

The strange “noise” she noticed in data from the radio telescope she helped build in a field outside Cambridge in 1967 while studying interplanetary scintillation from compact radio sources, was a pulsar radio.

“Pulsars are small pulsed radio stars, which are only about 10 miles in diameter and are very dense because they form when stars explode catastrophically,” she explains. Their beam can be compared to that of a lighthouse, and when it shines on a radio telescope, it can pick up a pulse. The discovery made her a star, although she missed out on a Nobel Prize.

Born in Lurgan, County Armagh, Bell became interested in science after reading an astronomy book her father pulled out of the library. Growing up in a Quaker family, she was brought up “believing she had as much right to an education as anyone else” and decided early on to pursue science studies, even though very few girls. were doing it at the time.

Bell moved to York, UK to attend Quaker boarding school at the age of 13, where she took science lessons. After graduation, she attended the University of Glasgow, where she obtained a degree in physics in 1965 before being accepted into the New Hall at Cambridge University to study quasars.

There is a committee that decides who will receive the Nobel Prize. Until then, they had never considered astronomy to be physics

An active and luminous galactic nucleus, quasars are powered by supermassive black holes, with a mass ranging from millions to tens of billions of times the mass of the sun. Bell was responsible for operating the telescope she helped build and for analyzing its data. “This was before computers, so there was over 30 yards of paper to look at in your hand every day.”

After completing her doctorate, Bell married and left Cambridge to raise her son and travel with her then-husband across the UK, where his career took him.

She held a junior teaching fellowship at the University of Southampton, where she developed and calibrated a 1-10 million electron volt gamma-ray telescope, before taking up a research position teaching astronomy X-ray at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in London.

In 1974, the discovery of radio pulsars earned his supervisor Anthony Hewish a Nobel Prize. For many, the omission appeared to be due to her gender, as at the time women were an anomaly in physics and astrophysics, but Bell attributed it to the fact that she was a doctoral student at the time of the discovery in 1967. at the University of Cambridge.

“There is a committee that decides who will receive the Nobel Prize. Until then, they had never considered astronomy to be physics.

She said there were advantages to not winning the coveted award. “Once you win a Nobel Prize you won’t get any other prizes because others think they won’t match, but if you don’t you will get many more prizes. “

She received the Oppenheimer Prize for “Outstanding Contributions to Theoretical Natural Sciences” in 1978, the Beatrice M Tinsley Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1987, the Herschel Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in 1989, while also winning the Michelson Medal. and being knighted by the queen in 2019.

Bell was president of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2002 and 2004, and president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 to October 2010.

In 2018, she received the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and donated the full £ 2.3million to help female, minority and refugee students who wish to become physics researchers. The program, administered by the Institute of Physics, became the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund.

In 2021, she received the Copley Medal, only the second woman to win it after Dorothy Hodgkin won it in 1976. “Interestingly, she was also a Quaker,” she says. She is currently a visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford where she studies neutron stars, and a fellow of Mansfield College.

About his Irish roots, Bell says; “I am an honorary member of the Royal Dublin Society and come on vacation. My family is from Dublin and I really enjoyed visiting Ireland last summer. A glorious day at Howth Head was a highlight. “

Asked about the final frontier of spatial knowledge – Earth-like planets, Bell says there is progress. “We find a lot of planets around the stars and try to see if they support life,” she says.

Currently residing at Oxford, where she still teaches, she says the universe always asks more questions than answers. The pulsars she discovered in 1967 are used as proposed road signs for interstellar navigation and a map, which could direct aliens to earth. Perhaps in the decades to come, they could not only help scientists detect gravitational waves, but also communicate with alien life forms.