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In 1967, as a graduate student at Cambridge, Jocelyn Bell Burnell spotted the regular radio pulses that led to the discovery of pulsars: collapsed, fast-spinning stars that sweep out radio waves like a lighthouse beam. She was left out of the 1974 Nobel Prize, which went to her supervisor Antony Hewish and to Martin Ryle.

Cambridge, 1967

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The story behind the card

Bell Burnell had spent two years helping to build the radio telescope near Cambridge, and she checked up to 29 metres of chart paper from it a night. Among the traces she noticed a faint, regular 'bit of scruff'. She and Hewish half-jokingly labelled it LGM-1, for 'Little Green Men', before it was identified as a neutron star, the tiny, dense core left when a massive star explodes, spinning and sending out a pulse every 1.33 seconds. When the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Hewish and Ryle, the astronomer Fred Hoyle publicly objected. Bell Burnell herself said it would demean the prizes to give them to research students except in very exceptional cases. In 2018 she won the $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and gave all of it to fund physics scholarships for students from under-represented groups.

Türkçe oku
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, 1967'de Cambridge'de doktora öğrencisiyken pulsarların keşfine yol açan düzenli radyo atımlarını fark etti. Pulsarlar, radyo dalgalarını deniz feneri gibi çevreye saçan, hızla dönen çökmüş yıldızlardır. 1974 Nobel Ödülü ise ona değil, danışmanı Antony Hewish ile Martin Ryle'a verildi.
Cambridge, 1967

Bell Burnell, Cambridge yakınındaki radyo teleskobunun kurulmasında iki yıl çalışmıştı; teleskobun kayıtlarını, her gece 29 metreyi bulan kâğıt şeritler üzerinde tek tek inceliyordu. Bu izler arasında silik ama düzenli bir leke gözüne çarptı; kendisi buna “bir parça kir” diyordu. Kendisi ve danışmanı Hewish, sinyale yarı şaka “Küçük Yeşil Adamlar” anlamına gelen LGM-1 adını verdi. Sonradan kaynağın bir nötron yıldızı olduğu anlaşıldı: Büyük bir yıldız patladığında geriye kalan, çok küçük ve son derece yoğun çekirdek. Bu yıldız dönerken 1,33 saniyede bir radyo atımı yayıyordu. 1974 Nobel Fizik Ödülü Hewish ile Ryle'a verilince gökbilimci Fred Hoyle buna açıkça itiraz etti. Bell Burnell ise ödülün, çok istisnai durumlar dışında araştırma öğrencilerine verilmesinin ödüllerin değerini düşüreceğini söyledi. 2018'de kazandığı 3 milyon dolarlık Temel Fizik Özel Breakthrough Ödülü'nün tamamını, fizikte az temsil edilen kesimlerden gelen öğrencilere burs olarak bağışladı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Jocelyn Bell Burnell
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