Jocelyn Bell Burnell Wins $ 3 Million for Pulsars

When Nobel Prizes are circulating every year, there is inevitably a discussion not only about the winners, but also about who should have won, but not the women scientists. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars in the 1960s, is one of the most frequently mentioned names. Now 75 years old, she has just received a prize that is undoubtedly better: a special prize of $ 3 million in basic physics.

Initially founded in 2012, the Breakthrough Awards are intended to be the "Oscars of Science". In addition to regular awards, the Selection Committee is also free to award a special Discovery Prize in Basic Physics at any time, and it is not necessary that this honor be for recent discoveries. Bell Burnell is honored "for his fundamental contributions to the discovery of pulsars and for a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community".

A quiet revolutionary

Bell Burnell was born in Northern Ireland in 1943. His father, an architect, often took him to visit the Armagh Planetarium, which he helped to design, and the staff there encouraged to continue his studies in astronomy. The family was Quakers, a religious sect that traditionally supports women's education. There was just one problem: girls were not allowed to study science at the local school.

"Revolutions sometimes make others uncomfortable, do not they?"

"It was automatically assumed that girls were doing household science, such as cooking and needlework," says Bell Burnell. "The boys did science, and there was no discussion and no other options." This shocked young Jocelyn, as well as her parents, who angrily telephoned the director to protest. It was the same for two other groups of parents with girls who wanted to study science. The director gave in and when the next class reunited, the three girls were there, sitting inexplicably next to the teacher 's desk. "I do not think he's ever taught girls before," she says. "Obviously, we were dynamite or something, revolutions sometimes make others uncomfortable, is not it?" She had the highest marks on her exams.

But at age 11, Bell Burnell failed the standard British exam that would have allowed him to pursue higher education. Only a few years ago, she learned that the educational authorities of the time set a higher pass mark for girls than for boys, because the girls passed the test in much greater numbers. "Women did not have a career, they became housewives," she says. "So the authorities were worried about the number of girls going through school, when it was the boys who needed it." (For those who are tempted to say that this does not happen anymore, last month, the Washington Post reported that the Tokyo Medical University had artificially reduced the results of student intake examinations in order to limit the number of female doctors in its program.)

"I was very upset by the failure of this review," admits Bell Burnell, but his parents did not get discouraged, sending him to boarding school in England. There, she flourished under the tutelage of an inspiring physics teacher, and she continued to rank at the top of all her classes. She specialized in physics at the University of Glasgow and was accepted to the University of Cambridge as a graduate student. "But there was still this failure lurking in my psyche," she says.

This and his education in northwestern Ireland meant that Bell Burnell was suffering from a bit of impostor syndrome when it finally reached Cambridge's elite campus. in the 1960s to help his supervisor, Anthony Hewish, build a new type of radio telescope. "I thought that they had made a mistake admitting that they would find their mistake and that they would throw me in a timely manner," she said. "But I fought to get there and I did not go away from it." This has led her to work harder than anyone else, and it is this laborious persistence that has led to her capital discovery.

A little "scruff"

The new radio telescope of the Mullard Radioastronomy Observatory was completed in July 1967 and the team immediately began taking data. Bell Burnell's job was to examine reams and reams of paper (about 700 feet per week), looking for unusual anomalies in all these ink spikes representing galactic radioactive waves. In three weeks, she found one: a weak signal from a particular area of ​​the sky. He disappeared, then reappeared. Finally, she calculated that the signal arrived at intervals of 1.34 seconds, like on wheels.

It was very strange, the team having quickly dismissed any known natural source or any other form of interference. She and Hewish even joked that it could be a signal of an extraterrestrial civilization, doubling the object "LGM-1" for "Little Green Men". Then, just before Christmas, Bell Burnell spotted another signal from another part of the sky, this time every 1.25 seconds. She found two more signals just after the holidays, also from different parts of the sky. Clearly, this was not extraterrestrials, but a new type of star. She and Hewish nicknamed them "pulsars".

Today, we know that pulsars are a type of neutron star, a cousin close to black holes. Whenever a massive star runs out of fuel, it explodes into a supernova. If it's above a certain threshold en masse, it becomes a black hole. Below this threshold, it becomes an ultra-dense neutron star. Pulsars are unusual in that they rotate rapidly and have very strong magnetic fields, so that they emit beams of light at very high energy. The rotation of the star gives the impression that these beams are flashing like a cosmic lighthouse.

Everyone recognized that it was a capital discovery. By the end of 1968, astronomers had discovered dozens of additional pulsars, giving them an invaluable new tool for exploring the universe. (There are now more than 1000 known pulsars) The flicker of light since this first pulsar has alerted astronomers to the presence of interstellar material (the substance between stars), and pulsars have been used to confirm the first exoplanets. They could even test the forecasts of general relativity. If astronomers ever discover a pulsar orbiting a black hole, its regular signal could slow down in response to the latter's massive mass, as predicted by Einstein's theory.

Bell Burnell received his doctorate in 1969. Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974 for the discovery of the first pulsars, sharing this honor with fellow astronomer Martin Ryle. Remarkably absent from the quote: the woman who has gone through all these files and made the actual discovery.

No Nobel Prize for Bell

The omission has infuriated many astronomers who felt that Bell Burnell had been unjustly neglected, but she herself is much more circumspect about this controversial decision, pointing out that she was still a graduate student at the university. ;time. "I think it would hurt the Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not think it is one of them," was – she said during a speech at the New York Academy of Sciences. 1977.

"It took a long time for the physics community to recognize the existence of good physics in astronomy."

This point is debatable, but there was another strategic reason for not awarding the prize to a weak student, according to Bell Burnell: this set an important precedent. At the time, no astronomer had received a Nobel Prize because there was no price for astronomy (nor for mathematics). "It took a long time for the physics community to recognize the existence of good physics in astronomy and it is the discovery of these pulsars that convinced them," she says.

On her own, Bell Burnell has led a rich, fulfilling and fascinating life that is not lacking in rewards. So, does it matter if she lost the Nobel Prize?

Here is one way it could have been important. Shortly after this breakthrough, she married Martin Burnell, a government official whose job required them to move every two or three years to receive promotions. This iteration greatly reduced Bell Burnell's professional options. Every time the family moved, she wrote "a letter of begging" to the head of the astronomy institution there, asking if there could be a part-time position for her. These positions rarely involved original research, which she conducted in her limited free time.

"I have the kind of job you get when you write begging letters," says Bell Burnell sadly: public relations, observatory management, or coordinating research groups. Although today she enjoys the wide range of experiences that she has acquired, "some of it was a little hard to swallow". She compares this stage of her career to a game of Snakes and Ladders. It would move towards a position of greater prestige and greater responsibility, only to move again and start immediately below. If she had been a Nobel laureate, the research would certainly have been done by the institutions and the offers would have been made for research posts.

A new start

The couple divorced in 1993. With his son, Gavin, all great (and physicist at Leeds University), Bell Burnell was free to pursue the kind of work that she had always wanted. She became head of the Department of Physics at the Open University, a public educational and research institution focused on part-time studies and distance education. She built her own astrophysics research group and enjoyed teaching. Even though her students were often far apart and she rarely saw them, "the commitment they showed to the study was phenomenal, their persistence and the obstacles they faced." overcome. "

Bell Burnell has held several prestigious positions including President of the Royal Astronomical Society and the first female President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Institute of Physics of the United Kingdom. This week, she became Chancellor of the University of Dundee in Scotland and is visiting Oxford University to pursue exciting new research developments, such as the detection of binary black holes and stars at the University of Oxford. neutrons by gravitational waves. , and mysterious and fast radio explosions – peaks of intense energy picked up by radio telescopes. Astronomers are always intrigued by what could emit them.

Now she has a $ 3 million prize as the icing on the cake. And she has a message for young girls who are looking at the night sky and dream of doing the same kind of major discovery that she has done. "Do not give up," she says. "Everything is not going to be easy, but it's an incredibly exciting field, and if you can stay there, a lot of interesting things will be presented to you."