Happy birthday to #astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell! In 1967, as a grad student she discovered the 1st radio pulsar, a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of EM radiation. This radiation can only be observed when the star is pointed towards us; so, like the light from a lighthouse, it appears to pulse at a precise frequency. She had been working with her supervisor Hewish & others to construct a radio telescope to study quasars. 🧵1/n
#linocut #printmaking #histsci

at home watching physicist husband going to work to pursue what he loved. He insisted she return to grad school. Admitted to Georgetown at 23, expecting 2nd child. Writing her thesis, advisor Heyden got her in contact with #physicist George Gamow, who worked at nearby APL & adjunct at George Washington U who took her on as a student (PhD ‘54).

While 4 kids were young, she taught at Georgetown before gaining a position at Carnegie’s Dept of Terrestrial Magnetism.

1st woman to use Palomar Observatory in ‘65, solved lack of washrooms by cutting out a paper skirt & pasting it to the little man icon. With instrument maker Kent Ford she made most sensitive spectrometer of the day using his new magnetically focused image tube- allowing them to study small regions of galaxies like Andromeda, returning to her interest in galaxy dynamics.

Since mass is clustered in centre, nearer objects should go faster but they gathered dozens of rotation curves for galaxies & all were flat. Their data was undeniable. Dark matter proposed by Oort (‘32) & Zwicky (‘33) but largely ignored. "One day … I made sketches on a piece of paper, and suddenly I understood it all," Rubin said. A halo of unseen dark matter around galactic cores would spread mass throughout the galaxies, & speeds would remain flat with distance.

She championed #womenInSTEM writing, “I live and work under 3 basic assumptions. 1: There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman. 2: Worldwide, half of all brains are in women. 3: We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women.”

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1393796836/lino-block-portrait-of-astronomer-vera