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Astrophysicist lady Jocelyn Bell Burnell was right to be angry. She died for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974.
It was awarded to his former supervisor, Antony Hewish, for the discovery of pulsars: fast-spinning, fast magnetizing neutron stars – some of the smallest and densest celestial objects in the universe. But Bell Burnell was actually the one who discovered them when she was studying at Cambridge University in 1967.
However, she never complained about stupidity. "I think I was very successful in not getting a Nobel Prize," she told the Guardian this week. "If you receive 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 moving. Almost every year, there was some kind of party because I received another prize. It's a lot more fun.
Indeed, the praise continues for the benevolent scientist. On September 6, Bell Burnell learned that she had won the Special Fundamental Physics Award, an honor she shares with Stephen Hawking. The $ 3 million prize is funded by tech giants and wealthy scientists, such as Google's Sergey Brin, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and physicist and venture capitalist Yuri Milner.
The awards committee calls its "Oscars of Science" award, and the Breakthrough seems to be the newer and richer cousin of the sexiest Nobel, celebrated at a Silicon Valley TV gala with scientists and celebrities. music. Last year's famous presenters included musicians Wiz Khalifa and Nana Ou-Yang; actors Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis, Cameron Diaz and Morgan Freeman; and filmmaker Ron Howard.
The Breakthrough Award has been awarded since 2012. The award in fundamental physics rewards an individual or group of physicists who make a significant contribution to human knowledge. It is open to theoretical, mathematical and experimental physicists "working on the deepest mysteries of the universe," according to the award's website, and was founded by Milner. The special price in fundamental physics – unlike other price physics prices Breakthrough – is not related to a recent discovery and can be awarded at any time.
"Bell Burnell is receiving the award for his fundamental contributions to the discovery of pulsars and for a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community," the Breakthrough Awards Committee wrote in a statement. The commission wrote that the discovery of pulsars half a century ago was one of the biggest surprises in the history of modern astronomy: "transforming science fiction's neutron stars into reality in the way the most spectacular.
Before the discovery of Bell Burnell, scientists had predicted these neutron stars, but nothing indicated their existence. His work has led to other discoveries, including ways to test Einstein's theory of relativity and a new understanding of the origin of heavy elements in the universe.
"Professor Bell Burnell deserves this recognition. His curiosity, his diligent observations and his rigorous analysis revealed some of the most interesting and mysterious objects in the universe, "Milner said in a statement.
Indeed, the astrophysicist was rigorous. But it's not because she thought she would make a major contribution to human knowledge. On the contrary. She told the Guardian that she only found pulsars because she had an "impostor syndrome".
By her own account, Bell Burnell was so worried that she did not have what it took to be a great scientist – and even being excluded from Cambridge – that she was starting to pay close attention to the data that she was analyzing. of a new radio telescope at the school's Cavendish lab. His care led to the discovery of a weak but persistent pulse of radio waves every 1.5 seconds in this data. At first, his advisor rejected the signals as being made by the man. But months of data collection and patient observation led her to confirm what she had first suspected: she had found the first evidence of neutron stars, considered one of the most exotic objects of the universe.
"Legumes were so regular, so clock-like, that Bell and his supervisor Anthony Hewish could not believe it was a natural phenomenon," says NASA physicist Zaven Arzoumanian in an article published on the website of the agency. "Once they found a second, a third and a fourth, they started to think differently." Now scientists have identified some 2,000 pulsars.
Pulsars are sometimes assimilated to celestial lighthouses. From afar, these extremely dense neutron stars seem to spin like stars, because of the distortion of their light created by the variations of temperature and density of the Earth's atmosphere. But they are not stars – in fact, they look more like corpses of extra large stars that are dead.
Pulsars are relatively compact objects but contain more mass than the sun; they are members of the family of neutron stars. Neutron stars form when a particularly large star (four to eight times more massive than our sun) is short of fuel in its core and collapses on itself. Stellar death causes an explosion called supernova; and the neutron stars are the remains, the dense matter nuggets left after the explosion, like the skeletons of celestial objects. And the reason the pulsars seem to glow has nothing to do with atmospheric distortion – instead, the pulsars emit two beams of light fixed in opposite directions, and only seem to blink because they also rotate regularly.
What makes pulsars special is that they are neutron stars that emit gravitational waves. This allows scientists to use them to study extreme states of matter, search for planets beyond the solar system, and measure, among other things, cosmic distances.
During this time, Bell Burnell taught astronomy, worked at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, was president of the Royal Astronomical Society and became the first female leader of the Institute of Physics, an association charity based in London. organization that advances the teaching of physics, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the National Academy of Sciences and Letters of Scotland. She is currently Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University.
The laureate stated that she planned to donate her prize to the Institute of Physics to fund the tuition of under-represented individuals in the field, students who, just like Bell Burnell there are 50 years, feel impostors. offer.
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