Robert McNeesAstrophysicist 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
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.
SabrinaDent@mcnees I love this more than I can express. Thank you so much for sharing.
@sabrinadent Thanks!