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Jocelyn Bell Burnell is about to receive a well-deserved recognition, and a big chunk of change to throw.
The British astrophysicist will receive a special prize for discovery in fundamental physics, announced today the representatives of Breakthrough Prize (6 September). The $ 3 million award recognizes not only Bell Burnell's discovery in 1967 of the strange, fast-moving stellar bodies known as pulsars, but also his scientific leadership over the last 50 years.
"Professor Bell Burnell deserves all this recognition," said co-founder of the Breakthrough Award, Yuri Milner, today. "His curiosity, his diligent observations and his rigorous analysis revealed some of the most interesting and mysterious objects in the universe." [The Universe: Big Bang to Now in 10 Easy Steps]
A historical discovery
In 1967, Bell Burnell (then Jocelyn Bell) was a student at the University of Cambridge in England. One day in November, she noticed something odd in the data collected by a radio telescope that she and her supervisor, Antony Hewish, had helped to build – an impulse that was repeated every 1, About 3 seconds.
The signal was so strange that Bell Burnell and his colleagues nicknamed him Little Green Man-1, after the alleged aliens who would have generated it. But Bell Burnell quickly spotted other similar pings, suggesting that the source was a natural cosmic object.
The researchers eventually determined that these signals came from rapidly rotating neutron stars, the incredibly dense remains of massive stars dead in supernova explosions. These objects are known as "pulsars", a combination of "pulsation" and "quasar". (The quasars, incredibly bright galactic nuclei, were the targets of the new radio telescope used by Bell Burnell and Hewish.)
Pulsars are rapidly rotating, highly magnetized stars. See how they work here.
Credit: by Karl Tate, artist in computer graphics
Pulsars do not, however, pulsate; they emit beams of radiation permanently. The apparent pulsation is an artifact of the rotation of pulsars, which brings the beams of our planet closer together at regular intervals.
"The discovery of pulsars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell will always be one of the big surprises in the history of astronomy," said Edward Witten, chair of the selection committee for the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
"Until that moment, no one had a real idea of how neutron stars could be observed, if at all they existed," Witten added. "Suddenly, it turned out that nature has provided an incredibly accurate way to observe these objects, which has led to many further advances."
For example, scientists used pulsars to test Einstein's theory of general relativity, and the precision of their repeated signals allowed astronomers to build detailed maps of the cosmos.
Hewish won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974 for his role in the discovery of pulsars. He shared the award that year not with Bell Burnell, but rather with his fellow English astronomer Martin Ryle. Bell Burnell said that she was not sorry to be left behind, stating that she understands the logic of rewarding team leaders and supervisors rather than the students. in research. [Nobel Prize in Physics: 1901-Present]
Fifty years of leadership
Bell Burnell is now recognized for his crucial work on pulsars, but not only for that. Breakthrough Prize representatives also highlighted the importance of Bell Burnell's contributions to teaching and leadership. Over the past five decades, for example, she has led the Royal Astronomical Society and was the first female president of the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. (Bell Burnell is currently Chancellor of the University of Dundee in Scotland, as well as Professor of Visiting Astrophysics at Oxford University in England.)
And the $ 3 million will allow him to continue giving back.
"The plan is basically to use that money to fund research students – graduate students, particularly students from under-represented groups in physics," Bell Space told Space.com. basic professional society for people on the ground.
"I think I contributed partly because I felt like a stranger," she added. "I was one of the few women and I was not from South East England, the richest part of the country." So, I think that's one of the greater diversity of the workforce allows you to develop all kinds of things. "
Bell Burnell also stated that the price had completely taken him by surprise: "When we spoke about it, I was absolutely speechless, which is very unusual for me." was not something I'd even dreamed of imagining, so it was a wonderful surprise. "
Bell Burnell will officially receive the award on November 4th, at the Silicon Valley Breakthrough 2019 award ceremony. The winners of the annual Organization Awards in Physics, Life Sciences and Mathematics will also be honored at the ceremony, as will the winners of the Junior Challenge.
Bell Burnell will become just the fourth recipient of the "Special" Physics Award, which can be awarded at any time for extraordinary achievements. The others to be honored are Stephen Hawking; seven scientists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) played a crucial role in the discovery of the Higgs boson; and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory Collaboration (LIGO), which in 2015 produced the first direct detection of gravitational waves.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @ michaeldwall and Google+. follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
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