Jocelyn Bell Burnell

S. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, CBE, FRS FRAS (born Susan Jocelyn Bell, 15 July 1943), is a Northern Irish astrophysicist who discovered the first radio pulsars with her thesis advisor Antony Hewish.

Bell Burnell was born in Northern Ireland, where her father was an architect for the nearby Armagh Planetarium. He enjoyed a large library and encouraged her to read. She was especially drawn to the books on astronomy.

At eleven, she failed the 11+ exam and her parents sent her to the Mount School, a Quaker girls' boarding school in York, England. There she was impressed by a physics teacher who taught her:

"You don't have to learn lots and lots...of facts; you just learn a few key things, and...then you can apply and build and develop from those... He was a really good teacher and showed me, actually, how easy physics was."

Bell Burnell later attended the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge. At Cambridge, she worked with Hewish and others to construct a radio telescope for using interplanetary scintillation to study quasars, which had recently been discovered (interplanetary scintillation allows compact sources to be distinguished from extended ones). Detecting a bit of "scruff" on her chart recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars, Bell Burnell found that the signal was regularly pulsing, about once each second. Temporarily dubbed "Little Green Man 1" the source was eventually identified as a rapidly rotating neutron star.

After finishing her PhD, Bell Burnell worked at the University of Southampton, University College London and the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, before becoming Professor of Physics at the Open University for ten years, and then a visiting professor at Princeton University. Before retiring Bell Burnell was Dean of Science at the University of Bath between 2001 and 2004, and was President of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2002 and 2004. She is currently a visiting professor at Mansfield College, Oxford University.

Although she (famously) did not share the Nobel Prize with Hewish for her discovery, she has been honored by many other organizations. She was the Michelson Medal of the Franklin Institute (1973, jointly with Hewish). In 1978 she was awarded the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize from the Center for Theoretical Studies in Miami. She has been awarded the Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize of the American Astronomical Society (1987), the Magellanic Premium of the American Philosophical Society, the Jansky Lectureship of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1989). She has been awarded numerous honorary degrees, and is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

She is the house patron of Burnell House at Cambridge House Grammar School in Ballymena, Northern Ireland.

She has remained an active Quaker and delivered the 1989 Swarthmore Lecture^[1]. She is on the Advisory Board of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. She has campaigned to improve the status and number of women in professional and academic posts in the fields of physics and astronomy^[2]

References

See also

• Nobel Prize controversies

External links

• Freeview video 'Tick, Tick, Pulsating Star: How I Wonder What You Are?' A Royal Institution Discourse by the Vega Science Trust
• biography - compiled by Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics
• - An after-dinner speech by Jocelyn Bell Burnell on her life and the discovery of pulsars
• Royal Society citation
• Transcript of interview by Joan Bakewell for the BBC Radio 3 series "Belief" (2 January 2006)