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

When Jocelyn Bell Burnell began her doctoral studies in physics at the University of Cambridge in 1965, she was convinced she had made a mistake in admitting it. "I'm not bright enough for this place," she recalls thinking of the time.

This did not help that 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 told the Washington Post, "although we do not know this term at the time."

Bell Burnell's answer was to work as hard as possible. If they were throwing her anyway, she thought that she would know that she was not smart enough to be in Cambridge.

His diligence ended up paying off. Two years after his arrival in Cambridge, Bell Burnell discovered the first pulsars – a revolutionary revelation that earned him the $ 3 million breakthrough special prize in fundamental physics, awarded earlier to Stephen Hawking, among others.

This is an acknowledgment that many consider for a long time. Bell Burnell's dissertation director won the Nobel Prize for the same discovery – in 1974.

Like the stars of "Hidden Figures" and DNA researcher Rosalind Franklin, Bell Burnell's personal story embodies the challenges facing women in the scientific arena. Born in Northern Ireland in 1943, she struggled to take science classes after the age of 12. "The idea was that boys would do science and girls would do cooking and needlework." "It was such a firm assumption that it was not even discussed, so there was no choice in the matter."

In her first year at the University of Glasgow, she was the only woman enrolled in physics. The men whistled and heckled her every time she entered the conference room, she said.

"I learned not to blush," she said. "If you blush, they're just stronger."

In Cambridge, sexism was a bit more subtle, she said. When Bell Burnell became engaged, it was automatically assumed that she would give up the program soon because it was still shameful for married women to work. "I have a little feeling that because I was quitting, it was probably no longer worth investing in me," she said.

Then, in 1967, Bell Burnell alerted his supervisor, Antony Hewish, about an "intractable problem" when reading the radio telescope, namely that she was in charge of monitoring. It was the kind of detail that others might have ignored or neglected.

"The source did not seem to have been man-made – it moved with the stars, to the rhythm of the constellations," she told The Guardian in 2009. "We felt that there was was 200 light-years away, far beyond the sun and the planets, but still in our galaxy, the Milky Way. "

Jokingly, they labeled it LGM-1, which means "Little Green Men". When Bell Burnell returned to the observatory at 3 am on a cold December night, she had what she called "Eureka!" moment.

"Traveling through miles of maps, I discovered two other mysterious signals," she told The Guardian. "It turned out that I was discovering the first four examples of an unimaginable type of star: weird astral bodies that were transmitting radio beams as they circled in space like the beam of a lighthouse. called pulsars. "

The discovery of pulsars was "one of the biggest surprises in the history of astronomy, dramatically transforming science fiction's neutron stars into reality," the Breakthrough Prize Committee said Thursday. "Among the many subsequent consequences, it has led to several powerful tests of Einstein's theory of relativity and to a new understanding of the origin of the heavy elements of the universe."

When Bell Burnell and his supervisor published an article detailing their findings in 1968, they drew international attention. The media did not know what to do with a young female scientist who had made a major breakthrough, she told The Guardian.

"Photographers would say," Could you undo buttons on your jacket, please? " "She recalls." The reporters asked how many boyfriends I had. "

Then Hewish, his supervisor, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974 "for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars".

Being neglected by the Nobel Committee did not surprise him, Bell Burnell told Science News in a recent interview. That was how things worked at the time: the teachers, not the students, had the credit.

"At this point, the picture of science was that of an elderly man, and he was still a man, with a fleet of young people working for him," she said. . "And if the project went well, the man received praise.If the project went wrong, the man was blamed."

These days, his snobby is often cited as an example of how women's contributions to science are obliterated or neglected. But Bell Burnell, who currently teaches astronomy at Oxford University, says it does not bother him.

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

As for the $ 3 million, Bell Burnell, whose faith is Quaker preaches life simply, does not plan to keep anything.

"I do not need a Porsche or a Ferrari," she told the Washington Post. "I do not have an easy lifestyle."

Instead, the money will go towards creating scholarships for people from under-represented backgrounds who want to study physics. The funds will be administered by the Institute of Physics of the United Kingdom, and Bell Burnell hopes that the arrival of more people on the ground will lead to even more new discoveries.

"Maybe," she joked, "having people with the impostor syndrome is not a bad thing."

–The Washington Post