Biography

JOCELYN BELL BURNELL

Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born on July 15, 1943, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK, being the eldest of 4 siblings.

Her father was an architect for the Armagh Observatory, where Jocelyn spent much time as a child, and the encouragement of the observatory’s staff together with her fascination with her father’s astronomy books ended up developing her interest in astronomy. However, despite her desire for learning, she struggled in elementary school and even failed a test meant to gauge her aptitude for college

Always perseverant, her parents sent her to England to study at a Quaker boarding school, where she ended up distinguishing herself in her science classes and in 1965 obtained her Physics degree at Glasgow University, Scotland 1965.

After that, Bell moved to Cambridge to get her Ph D , where she had the opportunity to study interplanetary scintillation of compact radio sources while working in the construction of the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, studied interplanetary scintillation of compact radio sources and to start studying quasars, which had recently been discovered.

In 1967, together with Antony Hewish Bell discovered a few odd signals that she dubbed "scruff" while examining literally miles of printouts from the telescope. These "bits of scruff" appeared to be radio waves that were too rapid and consistent with originating from quasars During a few months, the team systematically eliminated all possible sources of the radio pulses which they affectionately labeled Little Green Men, in reference to their potentially artificial origins and, after considering many hypotheses, they ended up concluding that these signals originated from super-dense neutron stars, fastspinning collapsed stars too small to form black holes.

These were identified by the media as collapsed stars pulsars, and the story was released This discovery was responsible for the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded to Hewish and Martin Ryle, that lead Several prominent scientists to protest the omission of Bell Burnell, though she maintained that the prize was presented appropriately given her student status at the time of the discovery, though she has also acknowledged that gender discrimination may have also contributed for that

Ana Guedes