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.
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.
Juan Cabanela@mcnees The 1993 award was given in the shadow of Burnell having being shafted for the Nobel as a graduate student. I strongly suspect Hulse got the award more because the Nobel folks didn’t want to shaft another graduate student than solely because Hulse was male (they may have been influenced by Hulse being male). Taylor invited Burnell to be his guest when accepting the award, so pretty sure that this was part of it.
Akshay@Juan_Kinda_Guy @mcnees They were happy to give a Nobel to Lawrence Bragg in 1915, in spite of being the then equivalent of a graduate student!
AstroMike@Juan_Kinda_Guy @Akshay @mcnees Exactly. The Nobel committee got a lot of flack almost immediately. For example, from Sir Fred Hoyle. From Wikipedia:
“Yes, Jocelyn Bell was the actual discoverer, not Hewish, who was her supervisor, so she should have been included." This remark received widespread international coverage. Worried about being misunderstood, Hoyle carefully composed a letter of explanation to The Times.”