Pulsars are neutron stars, emerged from the explosion of a supernova, that rotate rapidly on themselves emitting strong radio signals. Its discoverer was the astronomer Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, born in Northern Ireland in 1943 . But how did such a find take place?
Jocelyn graduated in Physics and entered Cambridge University to do her doctoral thesis with the team led by British radio astronomer Anthony Hewish. In one of her long observation sessions, the Irishwoman picked up fast radio signals that were repeated with great regularity. After they discarded the idea that it could be alien signals, they deduced that it was a massive star with very peculiar characteristics, which they called a pulsar.
This discovery, which took place in 1967 and was a great step in the history of astronomy, would end up winning the Nobel Prize seven years later, if only for its supervisors, Hewish and Martin Ryle, and not for the real protagonist. Two years later, Jocelyn began researching gamma ray astronomy at the University of Southampton. In 1982 he moved to Edinburgh to study the galaxies at the city’s observatory, aided by images provided by the Exotat satellite.
Despite being excluded from that Nobel Prize, his research has brought him numerous awards, including the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society of London, for his discovery of pulsars, the Oppenheimer Award of the Center for Theoretical Studies Miami Award Beatrice M. Tinsley of the American Astronomical Society, etcetera.
