How I was discovered; The drama behind Pulsars

They rotated silently in space. Emitting their electromagnetic waves. Unknown to the rest of the world for millennia. That is until Miss Susan Jocelyn Bell came along.

The 24-year-old astrophysics student was in her postgraduate year. She was far away from her home in Northern Ireland. A few years back, she received her degree from the University of Glasgow with astounding results. And now she’s aiming to finish her Ph.D. She was working at Cambridge University as a student under the instructions of her professor, Sir Hewish.

Their project was to build an 81.5 MHz radio telescope. This telescope was meant to observe quasars. (Quasars are celestial body that’s similar to stars in their appearance but with longer wavelengths. Don’t confuse them with pulsars! ) This telescope was specialized for radio observing. They look less like a telescope and more like panels of complex wires spread across an area.

Picture: Miss Bell in front of the radio telescope that was to discover pulsars.

Picture: Miss Bell in front of Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory where she worked as a student.

In 1967, the construction of the telescope was completed. Miss Bell’s task was to analyses the data produced every four days. She has to read the markings on a 120 meters chart paper. After several weeks of this, she noticed some unusual radio activities. It was travelling way to fast and it pulsed in repeat. This was a breakthrough of modern astronomy. And she was sure of it.

At first, when Miss Bell told Sir Hewish about this, her professor was skeptical. It could've sourced from human error or instrument defect. So Sir Hewish inspected the state of the telescope and found nothing wrong with them. After some time they both come to a term that this is a significant new discovery.

The discovery made headlines everywhere. Scientists use pulsars to understand the nature of stars and black holes. In 1974, a Noble Prize in Physics was given for the discovery of pulsars. But there was one problem-it wasn't for Miss Bell. The prize was awarded to Sir Hewish, her instructor.

Many scientists criticized the exclusion of Miss Bell from the award's recipient list. Although her instructor played the decision-making role and designed the radio-telescope, the research was still her Ph.D. thesis. The Nobel institution argued with the fact that Miss Bell was a student at that time. Thus, unfit to receive the credit for the discovery of an important celestial body in astronomy.

After several decades, Miss Bell (now known as Madam Burnell) was finally awarded with the Special Prize for Breakthrough in Fundamental Physics in the year of 2018. Although she did not share the Nobel Prize for the discovery of pulsar, she had inspired many young minds in the astronomy field.

Reference:

University of Cambridge (n.d.). Journeys of Discovery: Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Pulsars. Retrieved from University of Cambridge: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/journeysofdiscovery-pulsars