Decades after being awarded for a Nobel, Jocelyn Bell Burnell gets his due | Smart News

The Nobel Prize is infamous for snubbing women in science. Ask astrophysicist Lady Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, whose breakthrough discovery of pulsars was overlooked when her advisor was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1974. Now, as reported by Sarah Kaplan and Antonia Noori Farzan for the Washington Post51 years after Bell Burnell made his first documented observations of the energetic corpses of missing stars known as pulsars, his field contributions are rewarded with a $ 3 million special prize in basic physics. Bell Burnell is the fourth recipient of the prestigious award including Stephen Hawking, the seven CERN scientists whose leadership led to the discovery of the Higgs boson and the LIGO collaboration that detected gravitational waves.

"The discovery of pulsars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell will always be one of the great surprises in the history of astronomy," said Edward Witten, chair of the selection committee for the Breakthrough Prize, in a press release.

Bell Burnell was a PhD student in physics at the University of Cambridge when she first noticed the mysterious mystery series in 1967 when reading a radio telescope. Other observations showed that pulses occurred every 1.3 seconds "in his data. Bell Burnell's advisor, Antony Hewish, was initially skeptical of the results, dismissing them as artifacts in his readings. But Bell Burnell was certain that it was not artificial noise. In early 1968, his work was rewarded by the publication of the first scientific article documenting pulsars.

As Space.com Writer Calla Cofield explains that pulsars, compact spherical objects belonging to the "family of objects called neutron stars", emit beams of radiation from their two poles, but because they spin, these pulses out of sight. Because of these precise impulses, astronomers can use pulsars as landmarks to map the cosmos or as metronomes to track the course of interstellar events millions of light years away. In the decades that followed their discovery, physicists also used pulsars to test Einstein's theory of general relativity and to detect gravitational waves.

The discovery of pulsars was so important that in 1974, Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in physics with fellow astronomer Martin Ryle. This was the first time the award was given to the field of astronomy – but Bell Burnell's contributions to this groundbreaking discovery were not mentioned.

As Bell Burnell told Jane J. Lee at National Geographic in 2013, such oversight was more or less comparable to that of the course: "The picture that people had at the time of science was that there was an elderly man – and that's He was always a man – who had under his command full of henchmen, junior agents, who were not expected to think, who were to do only what he had said.

The special Breakthrough Award recognizes not only Bell Burnell's historic discovery, but also his ongoing commitment to the scientific community and beyond. For the past five decades, she has remained both an educator and researcher, as president of the Royal Astronomical Society and first female president of the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Currently, Bell Burnell is visiting professor of astrophysics at Oxford University and Chancellor of the University of Dundee. She was appointed Lady Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2007.

Bell Burnell will officially receive the award in November at the Breakthrough Award Ceremony in 2019 in Silicon Valley, California. However, it has already announced its intention to donate the $ 3 million associated with the award to the British Institute of Physics to fund scholarships for women, under-represented groups and refugees interested in studying physics. . Building on her own experiences as a woman in the field of science, Bell Burnell says he wants to get the money to fight the "unconscious bias" that continues to prevail in the field, reports Ghosh. BBC News.

"I think I contributed partly because I felt like a stranger," says Bell Burnell to Mike Wall. Space.com. "The growing diversity of the workforce actually makes it possible to develop all kinds of things."

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