Profile: Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Astronomer and discoverer Jocelyn Bell Burnell visited UM last fall as part of the Einstein Theme Semester. While here, WISE hosted a lunch with Burnell for graduate women where she discussed the positive and negative aspects of being a woman scientist.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell is perhaps best known for the scandal surrounding her discovery in the 1960's of pulsars. What could be scandalous about stars? Bell, credited with the discovery, was passed over for the Nobel Prize awarded to her Cambridge graduate adviser Anthony Hewish.

Bell was working on analyzing the data from the 4.5-acre radiotelescope that Hewish had designed and built in cooperation with Bell. Within two months of the telescope's startup, Bell found what she referred to as a "bit of scruff". She remembered that she had previously seen similar data from the same part of the sky and noted that the object was keeping sidereal time, important because that signal meant it was not manmade.

The pulses put out by the object signaled with much more frequency than other known star: they came every 1 1/3 seconds and were incredibly regular, whereas as the fastest-rotating known star rotated only three times a day. After the discovery of a second object, this one pulsing even faster, Hewish published a paper in Nature.

Bell had to cope with pursuant press excitement (the name pulsar was actually coined by reporter - Bell doesn't like the term), much of which centered on the fact that Bell was a woman. While they asked her male colleagues about astronomy, reporters asked Bell about boyfriends and whether or not she was taller than Princess Margaret.

In 1974, Hewish and another man won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of pulsars. When controversy broke out over who deserved the prize, Hewish observed that Bell had just been doing her job, while Bell herself publicly agreed that she did not deserve the prize.

February 2006 eNews