Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born #OTD in 1943. As a grad student at Cambridge in 1967, she discovered an entirely new type of celestial object: Pulsars!
Photo: National Science & Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library
Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born #OTD in 1943. As a grad student at Cambridge in 1967, she discovered an entirely new type of celestial object: Pulsars!
Photo: National Science & Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library
@mcnees Stealing scientific results from women ist still very common. My old boss stole a colleague's Greenland Canyon, he wouldn't let her publish until she had quit and then became first author on her paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canyon_(Greenland)
@mcnees love her https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/28/itll-upset-a-few-fellows-royal-society-adds-jocelyn-bell-burnell-portrait
@katzenschiff Absolutely bonkers, disgraceful behavior.
Bell was a graduate student in 1967 when she and her doctoral advisor Antony Hewish constructed a low frequency radio array to study the effect of the solar wind on nearby radio sources.
During the commissioning phase of their array, while analyzing long readouts of data by hand, Bell discovered a regular signal with a very stable period of about 1.33s.
Bell and Hewish quickly ruled out a problem with the instrument or human-made interference as explanations.
Imagine seeing that remarkably regular signal and not knowing of an astrophysical source that might explain it.
They jokingly nicknamed it LGM-1, for "Little Green Men."
Here is a transcript of Jocelyn Bell Burnell's after-dinner speech at the Eighth Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics, recounting the discovery.
The sources were soon identified as rotating, magnetized neutron stars. A tightly collimated beam of radiation is ejected along the neutron star's magnetic axis. We see regular pulses as it rotates, hence the name "pulsar."
The discovery of pulsars provided an extraordinary new laboratory for physics. For example, a gradual decay in the orbit of the pulsar-neutron star binary PSR B1913+16 matches the prediction of general relativity, with energy lost via gravitational waves.
Image: NASA
Antony Hewish received the Nobel Prize in 1974 for his "decisive role in the discovery of pulsars." In a move that can only be described as gratuitous sexism, the Nobel Committee decided not to include Jocelyn Bell Burnell on the prize.
A younger graduate student (Brian Josephson) had received a share of the prize the previous year, so it's not like there was a prohibition against awarding students.
But that's not all. It gets worse.
In 1974, the year Hewish got the prize, there was another important pulsar discovery.
That year, Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor discovered an important binary pulsar pair. They were rightly awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for this discovery!
Russel Hulse was 24 year old graduate student at the time, just like Jocelyn Bell Burnell when she made her discovery. Taylor was Hulse’s advisor.
But Hulse was a man, so he was given a share of the prize.
The Nobel folks always leave this bit out.
"Although I was not included, I celebrated that first award in 1974 of the Physics Prize for an astronomical discovery. Now I celebrate the fact that we have a better understanding of the teamwork necessary for scientific progress."
Jocelyn Bell Burnell has received just about every other award under the sun, including the 2018 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. She used the prize money —about £2.3 million— to establish a scholarship for white women, minority, and refugee students in physics.
Anyway, happy 80th birthday to Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars!
Important pulsar fact!
The cover of the Joy Division album "Unknown Pleasures" was adapted from a plot that radio astronomer Harold Craft made for his PhD dissertation, using data collected at Arecibo while studying the pulsar discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
@sabrinadent Thanks!
@mcnees I love this more than I can express. Thank you so much for sharing.
@mcnees I really think the Nobel committee should be able to modify earlier awards to correct injustices like these. Thanks for sharing that screenshot of the Nobel social media post. It's just salt on the wound.
@snack correct
@mcnees --> She was working with her advisor, Dr. Anthony Hewish, to make radio observations of the universe <--
So two people collaborated on the discovery.
@snack Did you have a question about that?
@mcnees Did I ask one?
@snack Sorry, I don’t understand. Is there a point you were making, or something that wasn’t clear?
@snack Please, if there’s something you wanted to ask, or a point you were trying to make about the work she did, don’t be hesitant. Just say what you mean.
@mcnees woah!
Wonderful thread: informative, exciting, infuriating, and ultimately so encouraging. The Nobel prize committee blew it big time in this case (and in many others), other institutions did better, progress is painful, a great scientist succeeded. Thanks for writing this account, it tells us so much.
@the_roamer thanks!
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