Jocelyn Bell Burnell

• Born: July 15, 1943
• Place of Birth: Northern Ireland

• BRITISH ASTRONOMER
• As a graduate student in radio astronomy at Cambridge University, Burnell helped construct a large radio telescope array. Using this telescope in 1967, she found an unexpected series of rapid radio pulses from outer space, leading to the discovery of rotating neutron stars called pulsars. In 2018, she was awarded the Breakthrough Prize for her discovery.
• PRIMARY FIELD: Astronomy
• SPECIALTY: Astrophysics

Early Life

Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born Susan Jocelyn Bell in Northern Ireland. Her childhood home was near the Armagh Observatory, which her father, an architect, helped design. Her early contacts with the observatory and its staff led to an interest in astronomy. Her father had a large personal library, which he encouraged her to use, and she took a special interest in books on astronomy. In spite of the interest her parents took in her early education, at age eleven she failed the exam required for British students who want to prepare for a university education. In later years, she viewed this failure as an important turning point in her life, since her parents then sent her to a private boarding school from 1956 to 1961.

The Mount School in York, England, was a Quaker school for girls. Burnell received strong religious training in the Quaker tradition and strong scientific teaching, especially from a physics teacher who taught her that basic principles in science were more important than learning a lot of facts. After graduation, she was admitted to the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where she majored in physics and earned a BS in 1965. She then began a graduate program in radio astronomy at Cambridge University in England, where she completed her PhD in 1968. In the same year, she married Martin Burnell, with whom she had one child; the couple later divorced.

Life’s Work

During her first two years at Cambridge, Burnell worked under the supervision of radio astronomer Antony Hewish on the construction of a large radio telescope consisting of an array of 2,048 wire antennas that covered nearly five acres of land. This array of antennas was tuned to a frequency of 81.5 megahertz and was designed to detect compact radio sources such as quasars from the scintillations (twinkling) they produce. After the telescope was finished in 1967, it was Burnell’s job to operate it and to analyze the 120 meters or so of chart recordings it produced every week.

By August 1967, Burnell noticed a fluctuating source taking up only about two centimeters of the long chart paper, what she called “a bit of scruff.” This led her to install a special high-speed detector to record rapid intensity changes. On November 28, 1967, she found that the source was emitting short radio pulses every 1.337 seconds to an accuracy of one part in a million. She recognized that these pulses were too fast and regular to come from a quasar. Burnell consulted with Hewish, who initially discounted the data as noise from terrestrial radio interference, but the two soon realized that the short duration of the pulses implied that the source could not be larger than Earth. At first, they entertained the possibility that the signals might be from an extraterrestrial civilization, signals they whimsically designated LGM (Little Green Men), but they could not discern any recognizable code in the signals. When three more similar pulsating sources were detected, they concluded that the signals must be from some natural phenomenon.

The Cambridge group announced the discovery of the first pulsar (PSR 1919+21, designated by its coordinates; also referred to as CP (Cambridge Pulsar) 1919) in the February 24, 1968, issue of the journal Nature. Their article, “Rapidly Pulsating Radio Source,” was coauthored by Hewish, Burnell, and fellow astronomers John Pilkington, Paul Scott, and Robin Collins. In this article they proposed that the source might be a pulsating white dwarf or neutron star, which they called a “pulsating radio source,” or pulsar, short for “pulsating star.” It was later shown that these pulsating signals did in fact come from rapidly rotating neutron stars.

Burnell completed her PhD thesis on interplanetary scintillation of compact radio sources in 1968, with her famed discovery of pulsars appearing as an appendix. Burnell worked part-time for the next eighteen years. From 1968 to 1970, she held a postdoctoral Science Research Council Fellowship and from 1970 to 1973, she served as a junior teaching fellow at the University of Southampton. At the same time, she used satellite data to study electron density in the ionosphere and developed a gamma-ray telescope in the million-electron-volt range. From 1974 to 1982, she did research at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London, analyzing x-ray emissions from galactic sources and globular clusters. For the rest of the 1980s, she was a senior research fellow at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she observed infrared radiation from galaxies, and she headed the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope section based in Hawaii.

During the 1990s, Burnell was a professor of physics at the Open University in Great Britain, an appointment that doubled the number of female physics professors. After serving as a visiting professor at Princeton University, she became dean of science at the University of Bath from 2001 to 2004. During this time she also served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 2006 she chaired the International Astronomical Union meeting that reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet. Since her retirement, she has been a visiting professor at Oxford University. She served as president of the Institute of Physics (IOP) from 2008 to 2011, president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh from 2014 to 2018, pro chancellor of Trinity College Dublin from 2013, and chancellor of the University of Dundee from 2018. She also served on the advisory board of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion.

Burnell’s many honors include the Michelson Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1973 (shared jointly with Hewish), the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1989, the Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture in 2010, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 2015, the Women of the Year Prudential Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015, and dozens of honorary degrees. For her contributions to science, Burnell was appointed a commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1999 and dame commander in 2007. She was also named a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. In 2020, she was elected a legacy fellow of the American Astronomical Society.

Impact

Burnell’s discovery of the first pulsar opened up a new field of astronomy. After the first four pulsars were found by the Cambridge group, many more were discovered. In late 1968, one was found with the 305-meter radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, with a very short period of only thirty-three milliseconds near the center of the Crab nebula, known to be the remnant of a supernova explosion. By the end of 1968, more than one hundred technical papers reported numerous observations and interpretations of pulsars. Thomas Gold at Cornell University proposed that pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars formed by supernova explosions with strong magnetic fields that transfer energy into a rotating beam of radio waves. He successfully predicted that the loss of rotational energy would result in a slight slowing of the pulsar repetition rate, as confirmed by the Crab nebula pulsar. Research on pulsars has also been used to test the theory of general relativity and to find the center of mass of the solar system.

In addition to stimulating research in astronomy, Burnell’s discovery of pulsars proved the growing contribution of women in science and provided a role model for women in astrophysics. When the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics—the first ever given for astronomy—was awarded to Hewish, and not to Burnell, for the discovery of pulsars, several distinguished astronomers objected to the Nobel Committee’s failure to acknowledge her primary role in the discovery. Notably, Burnell took it in stride, telling interviewers that it was typical to overlook graduate students' work and that Nobel winners are celebrated and soon forgotten while she has received continued recognition for her accomplishments. Special commendation as an astronomer of note first came in 1987, when Burnell received the inaugural Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize of the American Astronomical Society. She helped create the Athena Swan Awards for women scientists and, the IOP renamed its Very Early Career Female Physicist Award for her in 2016. Further acknowledgement came in 2018, when Burnell was announced as the fourth winner of the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her discovery of pulsars; a longtime champion for diversity in science, Burnell chose to donate the $3 million purse to fund IOP doctoral scholarships for women and minorities underrepresented in physics. The scholarships became known as the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund.

Burnell received numerous awards and honors during the early 2020s. In 2021, she was the recipient of both the Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society and the Royal Society's Copley Medal. In 2022, the esteemed scientist was granted the Matteucci Medal by the Accademia nazionale delle scienze in Italy. Burnell was awarded the Cunningham Medal by the Royal Irish Academy in 2023. That same year, she was named as a recipient of the Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award.

In February 2024, at the age of eighty, Burnell hosted a public lecture about her career and the social barriers experienced by women of her time at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York. The lecture was titled, "Tick, Tick, Tick, Pulsating Star, How We Wonder What You Are!"

Bibliography

"Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell Shares Story of Science and Perseverance." Stony Brook University, 22 Feb. 2024, news.stonybrook.edu/university/astrophysicist-jocelyn-bell-burnell-shares-story-of-science-and-perseverance/. Accessed 17 Oct. 2024.

Drake, Nadia. ""Meet the Woman Who Found the Most Useful Stars in the Universe." National Geographic, 6 Sept. 2018, www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/09/news-jocelyn-bell-burnell-breakthrough-prize-pulsars-astronomy. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Ferguson, Kitty. Prisons of Light: Black Holes. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

Hargittai, Magdolna, and István Hargittai. Candid Science IV: Conversations with Famous Physicists. River Edge: World Scientific, 2004. Print

"Jocelyn Bell Burnell Named 2023 Recipient of the Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award." AAPT, 2023, www.aapt.org/aboutaapt/Jocelyn-Bell-Burnell-to-Receive-Richtmyer-Memorial-Lecture-Award.cfm. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Lyne, Andrew G., and Francis Graham-Smith. Pulsar Astronomy. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.

Stille, Darlene R. Extraordinary Women Scientists. Chicago: Children’s, 1995. Print.

Wu, Katherine J. "Decades after Being Passed Over for a Nobel, Jocelyn Bell Burnell Gets Her Due." Smithsonian, 10 Sept. 2018, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/decades-after-being-passed-over-nobel-jocelyn-bell-burnell-gets-her-due-180970248. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.