Jocelyn Bell Burnell

(1943 - Present AD)

Susan Jocelyn Bell was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on July 15, 1943. Her father was an architect and an avid reader. Through his books, Jocelyn was introduced to the world of astronomy. Her family and the staff of the Armagh Observatory, which was near her home in Belfast, encouraged her interest in astronomy. Jocelyn Bell's parents very strongly believed in educating women. When she failed the examination required for students wanting to pursue higher education in British schools, they sent her to a boarding school to continue her education.

In 1965, Jocelyn Bell earned a B.S. degree in physics from the University of Glasgow. Later that same year she began work on her Ph.D. at Cambridge University. It was while she was a graduate student at Cambridge, working under the direction of Antony Hewish, that Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars.

Bell's first two years at Cambridge were spent assisting in the construction of an 81.5-megahertz radio telescope that was to be used to track quasars. The telescope went into operation in 1967. It was Jocelyn Bell's job to operate the telescope and to analyze over 120 meters of chart paper produced by the telescope every four days. After several weeks of analysis, Bell noticed some unusual markings on the chart paper. These markings were made by a radio source too fast and regular to be a quasar. Although the source's signal took up only about 2.5 centimeters of the 121.8 meters of chart paper, Jocelyn Bell recognized its importance. She had detected the first evidence of a pulsar

In February of 1968, news of the discovery made by Jocelyn Bell was published in the journal Nature. Further studies by groups of astronomers around the world identified the signals as coming from rapidly rotating neutron stars. These objects, first noticed by Jocelyn Bell, became known as pulsars. The term pulsar is an abbreviation for pulsating radio star or rapidly pulsating radio sources.

Jocelyn Bell received her Ph.D. in radio astronomy from Cambridge University in 1968. She married during that same year and changed her name to Burnell. Since leaving Cambridge in 1968, Dr. Bell Burnell has studied the sky in almost every region of the electromagnetic spectrum. She has received many honors and awards for her contributions to science. She presently heads the physics department at Open University in England.