Let's read the biography of astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who continued her studies and supported the discovery of the pulsar, despite the intervention of women and their fields of work during her lifetime.
Her real name is Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, she was born on July 15, 1943 in Lurgan, Northern Ireland. She was born to her mother, M. Allison, and to G. Philip Bell, an architect whose father helped design an observatory. Jocelyn has a younger brother and two younger sisters. She was encouraged by her father to pursue a career in astronomy and read her father's books on astronomy.
Raised in Lurgan, Jocelyn was educated at Lurgan College's Preparatory Department from 1948 to 1956. She was back then when men were dominant and could read technical subjects. Girls were expected to learn only about cooking and cross-stitch. Jocelyn was able to study science after her parents and other people opposed the school's policies.
Having failed more than eleven exams, Jocelyn was sent by her family to The Mount School, a Quaker girls' boarding school in York, England. Jocelyn completed her secondary education here in 1961. She then enrolled at the University of Glasgow and graduated with honors in Natural Philosophy (physics) in 1965. She then enrolled at New Hall, Cambridge, to pursue her doctorate, graduating with her doctorate in 1969.
During doctoral studies, Jocelyn worked with Antony Hewish and others to construct the "Interplanetary Glow Array" to study recently discovered quasars. Jocelyn was the subject of the first episode of the three-part documentary TV series "Beautiful Minds" on BBC Four directed by Jacqui Farnham.
On November 28, 1967, Jocelyn, a graduate student at Cambridge, noticed "a little scratch" on chart recorder papers tracing the sky with stars. The signal, which can be seen in the data received in August, took three months to find due to manual checking of the papers. Jocelyn noticed that the signal was vibrating with great regularity, at the rate of about one pulse every one and three seconds. It was tentatively called "Little Green Man 1" (LGM-1). This was recorded as the first evidence of a pulsar.
After the news of the discovery was published, it was recognized as a rapidly rotating neutron star after further study by astronomers around the world, and these objects were called pulsars. The term pulsar is known as an abbreviation for pulsating radio star or rapidly pulsating radio sources. This was later documented by the documentary TV series "Horizon" on BBC Two.
Jocelyn worked at the University of Southampton from 1968 to 1973, then continued to work at University College London from 1974 to 1982. She later served at Edinburgh's Royal Observatory from 1982 to 1991. From 1973 to 1987, she worked as a teacher, consultant, examiner and lecturer at the Open University. During this time, Jocelyn began working as project manager for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and remained in that position until 1991.
From 1991 to 2001 she continued her work as the University's Professor of Physics. She also held other positions as visiting professor at Princeton University in the United States, and as Dean of Science at the University of Bath from 2001 to 2004, and as President of the Institute of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2002 and 2004.
Jocelyn, who chaired the Institute of Physics from 2008 to 2010, was announced in February 2018 when she was appointed President of the University of Dundee. In 2018, she was honored with the Special Breakthrough Award in Fundamental Physics for her discovery of radio pulsars. Unlike the regular annual award, this special Prize is not limited to recent discoveries and was valued at three million dollars (£2.3 million). She donated all the money to the fund, which will be run by the Institute of Physics, which uses it "to fund women, the underrepresented ethnic minority, and refugee students to become physics researchers."
Jocelyn, who is still Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University and a member of Mansfield College, expressed her happiness at working and contributing to science throughout her life.
Personal life
In 1968, Jocelyn became engaged to Martin Burnell. The couple married soon after. The couple has a son named Gavin Burnell. Jocelyn, whose husband is a local civil servant, came under criticism for the disgrace of women working during her lifetime. The couple decided to divorce in 1993.
Jocelyn is patron of "Burnell House" at Cambridge House Grammar School in Ballymena, where she campaigns to improve the status and number of women holding professional and academic positions in physics and astronomy. Jocelyn, who for two years helped create the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, was not recognized in the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Antony Hewish for the discovery of pulsars.
She featured prominently on Ulster Bank's new science-themed polymer £50 note, released in July 2022. She was honored with many awards for her contributions to science.