She made the discovery, but a man got the Nobel. Half a century later, she won a prize of $ 3 million.

"It represents something very important in our recent history," said Janna Levin, an astrophysicist at Barnard College of Columbia University. "She has tenacity, ingenuity, originality and a long tradition of astronomers … touching all branches of physics, I am absolutely delighted."

Bright enough

Like the stars of Hidden Figures and DNA researcher Rosalind Franklin, Bell Burnell's personal story embodies the challenges women face in science. Bell Burnell, born in Northern Ireland in 1943, had to fight for science after 12 years.

"The hypothesis was that the boys would do science and the girls would do cooking and needlework," she said. "It was such a firm assumption that it was not even discussed, so there was no choice in the matter."

But Bell Burnell would not be denied. She had read the cover of her father's astronomy books to cover herself, learning the jargon herself, and confronting complex concepts until she understood that she was a woman. she can understand the universe. She complained to her parents, who complained to the school, which eventually allowed her to attend the lab with two other girls. At the end of the semester, Bell Burnell is ranked first in the class.

In her first year at the University of Glasgow, she was the only woman enrolled in physics. The men were hissing and heckling when she entered the conference room. Blushing made them stronger, so she trained to be stoic.

When she arrived at Cambridge University for her graduate studies, Bell Burnell was certain that someone had made a mistake in admitting it. She was one of only two women in her graduate program and Cambridge was much richer than anywhere she had lived before. Both factors have probably contributed to her impostor syndrome, she said. "Of course, we did not know that term at the time."

"They'll surely realize I'm not bright enough," she recalls thinking. "But until they throw me out, I'm going to work very hard."

Bell Burnell joined the radio astronomy department of Cambridge, where his advisor, Hewish, was looking for quasars – incredibly bright objects in the distant sky whose origins were then unknown.

Hewish had designed his own telescope for the task: a 4-acre copper wire network dubbed "Interplanetary Scintillation Array". The wires would capture the invisible energy of radio waves emitted by the cosmos, then send an electrical impulse to a pen recorder, which would mark the signals on paper rolls. The resulting plots resembled pits and peaks on a cardiogram; Studying them was like watching the heartbeat of the universe.

Once the construction of the telescope was complete, Hewish asked Bell Burnell to retrieve and analyze the information collected. One day, in the summer of 1967, just before lunch, the young physicist noticed an "unclassifiable squiggle" on one of her cards. This was the kind of detail that others might have ignored or neglected; In fact, Hewish first insisted that it was simply an interference. But Bell Burnell's fear of knocking them out made her meticulous and a lifetime of outside feeling had opened her mind. She remained focused on the scribbling until she could understand it.

The signal was remarkably regular, pulsing every three seconds. And rather than abide by a 24-hour schedule – as one would expect if it had been produced by "Joe Doke driving home every day in a poorly repressed car" – said Bell Burnell. the stars. Estimates of its distance indicated it at a point in the Vulpecula constellation at about 2000 light-years.

Hewish and Bell Burnell jokingly baptized their discovery "LGM-1" or "Little Green Man". They could not find any explanation for such a steady signal – why not extraterrestrials?

Then, on an icy morning, just before Christmas, Bell Burnell noticed a second pulsation signal from another part of the cosmos. Seeing the faint burr on the reading of the telescope, she was filled with joy.

"When you get a second of something, it makes the first one a lot more believable," she said. "It's starting to look like a new kind of star of which there is probably a lot in the sky."

"It was my stars"

Soon, Bell Burnell discovers his third and fourth signals "LGM" and, in February 1968, discoveries are announced in a journal published in Nature, one of the most famous scientific journals. Hewish's name was the first listed on the study, that of Bell Burnell was the second. She was 24 years old.

"The radiation seems to come from local objects in the galaxy," the scientists wrote. They speculated that it could be associated with a white dwarf, the envelope of a star that burned through all its nuclear material. Or it could have been a neutron star – the dark, dense nugget left behind a stellar explosion, in which all the matter of a massive star collapsed into a space the size of Manhattan.

The existence of neutron stars had been theorized but never demonstrated. Doing something so dense would require gravity to defeat the forces that give structure to atoms. "You would end up with something that has been crushed beyond all recognition to become a state of matter that was not known before," said Levin, Barnard's astrophysicist.

Meanwhile, the journal Nature has generated a lot of publicity for researchers. In interviews, the journalists asked Hewish to explain the scientific significance of the discovery, then turn to Bell Burnell "for what they euphemistically call" the human interest, "she wryly recalled.

The reporters wanted to know her bust size and how many boyfriends she had. A photographer asked him to open an extra button on his blouse.

"It was very unpleasant," said Bell Burnell. "I would have liked to tell them to get lost.But I was still studying, I needed a reference from the lab and they needed publicity." So she smiled and claimed to have forgotten her bodily dimensions. And then she went back to studying one of the most exciting mysteries of astrophysics.

Nobody had yet understood what the pulsed signals were. In the attic above the observatory, she, Hewish and 13 other graduate students – all men – exchanged ideas about their backgrounds.

"I loved the excitement of the pursuit," she said, "trying to understand what these things were and why they behaved as they behaved."

In late 1968, several teams of astronomers reported having detected a regular radio flash coming from the heart of the Crab Nebula – the cloud of gas and dust left behind a supernova that lit up the sky in 1054.

This confirmed one of the theories of Bell Burnell and Hewish: The signals came from pulsars – a subset of neutron stars whose intense magnetic fields accelerate the particles into two powerful beams that explode from the body. 39, one or the other pole. Each time the star rotates, the beam briefly becomes visible from Earth, resulting in a predictable periodic pulse.

Bell Burnell earned his doctorate – the discovery of pulsar was part of his thesis – and was working at University College London when in 1974 a colleague came into his office. The Nobel Prize in Physics had just been announced and his name had not been mentioned.

"I think he was expecting me to be angry," Bell Burnell recalls. Yet she was delighted. She did not expect to be recognized – graduate students were rarely there. But it was the first time that the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to someone who studies the stars.

"Finally, the committee recognized that there was good physics in astronomy," she said. "I recognized that it was a huge precedent and I was rather proud that it was my stars who did it."

Bell Burnell stated that she felt no ill will towards the Nobel Committee, pointing out that she had received almost every other honors possible: Member of the Royal Society, President of Institute of Physics, lady commander of the Order of the British Empire. "I have a party almost every year for one thing or another," she said.

But other researchers see his exclusion as an injustice.

"She helped build the chart that she used to do the observation." She's the one who noticed her. 39 is a real signal, "said Feryal Özel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona. "When a graduate student takes this kind of advance in her project, it's hard to play it."

Özel noted that only two women received the Nobel Prize in physics, and none in the last fifty years. This despite the fact that women researchers have been pioneers in the field of nanoscience, established the existence of dark matter, explored new strange types of particles and helped map the universe.

"Women are underrepresented," said Özel. "I think it's great [Bell Burnell] make peace with her. But as a community, we do not want that to happen. "

Cosmic lighthouses

The realization that pulsars exist "was an incredible discovery," said Alice Harding, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "But I do not think anyone understands the importance of pulsars."

Over the past five decades, pulsar research has uncovered an extraordinary range of astronomical discoveries. Their regularity makes them ideal time keepers, more precise than atomic clocks. Their occasional twinkle revealed that there was stuff in the dark and seemingly empty space between the stars – helping scientists understand what's in the interstellar medium. The first confirmed exoplanets were discovered in orbit around a pulsar in the constellation Virgo, and the extreme conditions in their centers allowed some of the most rigorous tests of Einstein's theory of general relativity. .

Pulsar detection suggested that another hypothetical phenomenon – a black hole – could also be real. If the laws of physics allowed a dying star to fall on itself until even its atoms were stifled, why could not the collapse go farther, up to does an entire star be filled with only one invisible point?

The observations of Cygnus X-1, a powerful source of X-rays in our galaxy, have revealed that black hole theorists were right: there are bodies so dense that their gravity is powerful enough to prevent even the light from happening. ;escape.

Pulsars can also serve as "cosmic beacons" – important points of coherence in the vast and ever-changing universe. When the Golden Records – twin messages transmitting sounds and images of life on Earth – were launched aboard the Voyager spacecraft in 1977, their covers bore an image showing the sun's position against 14 pulsars. If extraterrestrial explorers or space human beings came to the discovery of documents in the distant future, scientists hoped that the pulsar "maps" would help identify the distant planet from which the spacecraft came.

Back on Earth, Bell Burnell's career was sometimes hindered by the strict social conventions of his day. Her family frequently moves for her husband's job and every time she arrives in a new city, she has to write a "begging letter" to the nearest observatory to ask for work. She has found herself with a "fantastic mix of jobs", studying the universe in every conceivable wavelength: X-rays, gamma rays, radio waves, infrared. But every time she was making her way to a leadership position within an organization, the Burnells would move out and she should start all over again.

"Do you have a game called snakes and ladders?" she says. "It was my career."

It was a constant battle to keep doing science. Childcare was difficult to find because women were expected to leave their profession when they became wives and mothers. Male colleagues often spoke to her or rejected her ideas or diminished her accomplishments.

"I was not alone either," said Bell Burnell. "I knew a number of other women scientists who were also frustrated and concerned."

In 2005, Bell Burnell partnered with other senior women scientists to establish the Athena SWAN Award, which recognizes institutions that take concrete and productive action to address gender inequality. In 2011, the Chief Medical Office of Britain announced that medical schools could only receive certain government research funding if they held one of these awards.

Bell Burnell is said to be "delighted" to receive the special Breakthrough Award. But she will not keep any of the bonuses.

"I do not need a Porsche or a Ferrari," she said. "I do not have an easy lifestyle."

Instead, the funds will go towards creating scholarships for women, underrepresented minorities and refugees who want to study physics. The funds will be administered by the UK Physics Institute.

"I think I discovered pulsars largely because I was a minority [at Cambridge]"And she has strong reason to think that other minorities might have similar feelings and work so hard and discover things."