In 1974, they gave the Nobel to his supervisor. Now she wins a $ 3 million prize: NPR

Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, photographed in 2011, received the $ 3 million Breakthrough Award in Basic Physics.

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Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, photographed in 2011, received the $ 3 million Breakthrough Award in Basic Physics.

Colin McPherson / Corbis via Getty Images

In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a graduate student in Cambridge, working on a thesis on strange objects in distant galaxies known as quasars.

She and her supervisor, Antony Hewish, had built a radio telescope to observe them. The telescope data was run on a machine – a line of red ink, streaking every day on 96 feet of graph paper.

Looking at the data, she noticed something strange: "an unclassifiable scribble," she recalls. He pointed to mysterious radio waves, jogging repeatedly.

She says she noticed the unusual signal only because she was suffering from the impostor syndrome: the idea that you are not good enough and that at any moment you could to be discovered as a fraud. For Bell Burnell, it was a fear that she would be fired from Cambridge, she said. The Guardian.

So she took more data from the telescope and continued scouring – but the blip disappeared. A month later, the signal came back.

Bell Burnell brought the results to Hewish.

"He said:" This is the rule, it is man, it is interference artificial radio, "" she told the newspaper. But she knew that it could not be an interference: the radio waves came from something that moved at the same speed as the stars – which meant that the source of the impulses had to be in space.

Bell Burnell in 1968 at the Mullard Radioastronomy Observatory at the University of Cambridge.

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Bell Burnell in 1968 at the Mullard Radioastronomy Observatory at the University of Cambridge.

Daily Herald Archive / SSPL via Getty Images

The dense objects responsible for squiggles are now known as pulsars – fast rotating neutron stars that emit radiation. Their sighting is considered one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the 20th century.

"The excitement was because it was a totally unexpected, totally new object, behaving in a way that astronomers had never expected, never dreamed," he said. she said in a BBC documentary.

The discovery of pulsars was so important that she won the Nobel Prize in 1974 – for Hewish.

Bell Burnell said it did not bother her much that she was not included. "[I]On those days, students were not recognized by the committee, "she said in 2009.

Fifty years after Bell Burnell noticed this error in red ink, his observation earned him a great prize: a special prize for basic physics, with a check for $ 3 million.

The Breakthrough Awards, funded by Silicon Valley personalities including Sergey Brin, Yuri Milner and Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, are the world's largest monetary science awards.

"The discovery of pulsars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell will always be one of the big surprises in the history of astronomy," said Edward Witten, chairman of the committee, in a statement. "Until that moment, no one had a real idea of ​​how neutron stars could be observed, if they existed." Suddenly, nature provided an incredibly accurate way to observe these objects.

Past winners include Stephen Hawking, CERN scientists involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson, and LIGO collaboration physicists who have detected gravitational waves.

Bell Burnell donates the prize to the UK Institute of Physics, where she will fund graduate scholarships for people from under-represented groups to study physics.

"I do not want to or do not need the money myself and it seemed like it was maybe the best use I could make there," he said. she told the BBC. What she says is happening in physics research jobs.

The astrophysicist noted that there has been a benefit to the Nobel snob all these years ago.

"I think I did very well not to receive a Nobel Prize," she told the guardian. "If you receive a Nobel Prize, you have this fantastic week and nobody gives you anything else.If you do not receive a Nobel Prize, you get everything that moves.Most every year, there is a kind of party because that I have another reward, it's a lot more fun. "