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Jocelyn Bell Burnell, visiting professor of astrophysics at Oxford University whose work in the 1960s ushered in a new era of astronomy, received a special $ 3 million prize in fundamental physics, announced the Breakthrough Foundation.
"I'm very surprised," says Bell Burnell, "almost speechless, which does not happen to me often." Previous winners include physicist Stephen Hawking, the seven scientists responsible for the discovery of the Higgs boson, and the entire international team responsible for the direct detection of gravitational waves. Bell Burnell will receive the award at an official ceremony in November in Silicon Valley.
"Professor Bell Burnell deserves this recognition," said Yuri Milner, the billionaire founder of the Breakthrough Awards. "His curiosity, his diligent observations and his rigorous analysis revealed some of the most interesting and mysterious objects in the universe."
A little more than half a century ago, while he was a British student at the University of Cambridge, Bell Burnell made a discovery that transformed astronomy: the pulsars . A pulsar is a rapidly rotating neutron star, a collapsed nucleus the size of a city made up of a degenerate sun and projecting beams of lighthouse type waves. A neutron star represents the most extreme known material form – the last stop in the universe before the overwhelming force creates a black hole – and the pulsars, which can rotate at about a quarter of a gear, are stars. with neutrons. This rotation – regular as a metronome – makes them powerful probes for a multitude of astrophysical phenomena.
"The discovery of pulsars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell will always be one of the big surprises in the history of astronomy," Witten said in a statement. Witten, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, is also chair of the 26-member Selection Committee for the Breakthrough Physics Awards. "Until then, no one really knew how neutron stars could be observed, if they existed." Suddenly, it turned out that nature has provided an incredibly accurate way to observe these objects, which has led to many further advances.
Working with his advisor, astronomer Antony Hewish, in 1967 and 1968, Bell Burnell first discovered that these objects regularly repeat blips on a background of cosmic static. She detected them using a new type of radio telescope she had helped build, based on the concepts of another astronomer, Martin Ryle. Bell Burnell's discovery alluded to the existence of black holes, which had not yet been detected at the time, and showed the way to rigorous new tests of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Pulsar timing studies have finally provided the first direct evidence of gravitational waves and exoplanets, and scientists have also used their explosions to map the interstellar medium and to glimpse the exotic states of matter at the core of each neutron star. .
In 1974, Bell Burnell's discovery earned him a Nobel Prize in physics, but only for Hewish and Ryle. Since then, her exclusion has been cited as an example of sexism in astronomy, placing her alongside other famous astronomers like Nobel, including Vera Rubin – who played a crucial role in the discovery of dark matter – and Margaret Burbidge, who helped to understand how chemical elements form in stars. At first, Bell Burnell played down the controversy, claiming that in 1977, Hewish deserved the award and that she believed that the awarding of Nobels to simple research students would "lower" the prices. But today, she admits that such statements came from her "precarious" time as a postdoctoral student, while she "was not able to go boating and" needed the support of senior men.
Now, she says, "I realized that if you get a Nobel, you get nothing else. Whereas if you do not get a Nobel, you seem to get all otherwise, frankly, it's a lot more fun. Almost every year, there are prizes and a party.
Yet for Bell Burnell, the consequences of his discovery were bitter-sweet. She is married and has stopped studying pulsars because her relationship with her husband and their child has led her to work part time in other areas of astronomy. , like sky observation by gamma rays, X-rays and infrared. "At the time, married women in Britain did not expect to work – it was shameful," she says. "It meant that the husband could not earn enough and he was also" proven "that if a mother worked, her children would become delinquents. There was no babysitting service, of course. I felt that I had no choice – it was a question of where my husband was working and what astronomical work I could do nearby.
Along the way, however, she has received many accolades and has become an influential advocate of equality in astronomy and, more broadly, women in science. In 2005, Bell Burnell co-founded the Athena SWAN initiative, which accredits universities and colleges to encourage the development of women and minorities, and was the first woman to chair the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the London Institute of Physics. . According to Bell Burnell, with the IOP, she plans to use her $ 3 million to create bursaries for graduate students from under-represented groups in physics. "There are a lot of people who are not very kindly treated by the current system," she says. "And we do not fully utilize the talents we have at home, regardless of what we lose because we do not offer them the best work environment …. We become much more alert, and gradually our action together in each of these areas. "
However, the Breakthrough Prize itself is still under development: it turns out that the prestigious selection committee that awarded the special award to Bell Burnell is composed exclusively of men and people Caucasian. Despite this, its price shows how much women in science have come in the last fifty years. "People are paying more attention to the achievements of women and men. There is still a lot to do, but it is much better than before.
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