Jocelyn Bell Burnell facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell
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Bell Burnell in 2009
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| Born |
Susan Jocelyn Bell
15 July 1943 Lurgan, County Armagh, Northern Ireland
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| Nationality | British |
| Education |
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| Alma mater | |
| Known for | Co-discovering the first four pulsars |
| Spouse(s) |
Martin Burnell
(m. 1968; div. 1993) |
| Children | Gavin Burnell |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Astrophysics |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | The Measurement of radio source diameters using a diffraction method (1968) |
| Doctoral advisor | Antony Hewish |
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a famous astrophysicist from Northern Ireland. She made an amazing discovery in 1967 while she was still a student. She found the first ever radio pulsars.
Pulsars are like cosmic lighthouses. They send out beams of radio waves as they spin. This discovery was so important that it led to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974. However, Jocelyn Bell Burnell was not given the prize, even though she found the pulsars.
She has held many important roles in science. She was the head of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004. She also led the Institute of Physics for a few years. From 2018 to 2023, she was the Chancellor of the University of Dundee.
In 2018, she won a special award called the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. It came with a lot of money, about $3 million. She decided to use all of it to help other students. Her fund helps female, minority, and refugee students study physics.
In 2021, she received the Copley Medal. This is a very old and important science award. She was only the second woman to ever win it.
Contents
Early Life and Education
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Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born in Lurgan, County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Her parents were M. Allison and G. Philip Bell. She grew up in a country home called "Solitude" with her brother and two sisters.
Her father was an architect. He helped design the Armagh Planetarium. When she visited the planetarium, the people working there encouraged her to study astronomy. She also loved reading her father's astronomy books.
School Days
She went to the Preparatory Department of Lurgan College from 1948 to 1956. Back then, schools often had different rules for boys and girls. Boys could study technical subjects like science. Girls were expected to learn things like cooking and cross-stitching.
Jocelyn's parents and others challenged these rules. Because of them, she was able to study science. This shows how important it is to stand up for what's right.
She did not pass an important exam called the eleven-plus exam. So, her parents sent her to The Mount School in York, England. This was a boarding school for Quaker girls. She finished her high school education there in 1961.
She really liked her physics teacher, Mr. Tillott. She said he made physics seem easy. He taught her that you don't need to memorize everything. You just need to learn a few main ideas. Then you can use those ideas to understand more complex things.
University Studies
After high school, she went to the University of Glasgow. In 1965, she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Philosophy, which is another name for physics. She graduated with honors.
Then, she went to New Hall, Cambridge. There, she earned her PhD in 1969. At Cambridge, she worked with Antony Hewish and others. They built a special telescope called the Interplanetary Scintillation Array. They used it to study quasars, which are very bright objects in space.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell's story was featured in a BBC Four TV series. It was called Beautiful Minds.
Her Amazing Discovery
On November 28, 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a student at Cambridge. She was looking at data from a special machine called a chart recorder. This machine tracked signals from space. She noticed a strange "bit of scruff" on the papers. It was a signal that moved across the sky with the stars.
She had seen this signal in data from August. But she had to check the papers by hand. It took her three months to find it again. She realized the signal was pulsing very regularly. It pulsed about once every 1.3 seconds.
"Little Green Men"
At first, they jokingly called the source of the signal "Little Green Man 1" (LGM-1). This was because they thought it might be a signal from aliens! But after several years, scientists figured out what it was. It was a rapidly spinning neutron star. These spinning stars are what we now call pulsars. The BBC Horizon TV series later made a documentary about this discovery.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell has talked about how the media reacted to her discovery. She said interviews often focused on her appearance. They would ask her about her hair color or boyfriends. Her supervisor, Antony Hewish, would be asked about the science. This shows how women in science were sometimes treated unfairly.
The term pulsar was actually created by a science reporter. He shortened "pulsating radio source" to pulsar.
Career and Contributions
Jocelyn Bell Burnell has worked at many universities and observatories. She worked at the University of Southampton from 1968 to 1973. Then she was at University College London from 1974 to 1982. She also worked at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh from 1982 to 1991.
She was a teacher and lecturer for the Open University from 1973 to 1987. In 1986, she became the project manager for a large telescope. It was called the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii. She held this job until 1991.
She became a Professor of Physics at the Open University in 1991. She stayed there until 2001. She also taught at Princeton University in the United States. She was the Dean of Science at the University of Bath from 2001 to 2004. She was also the President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004.
Later, she became a visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford. She was also a Fellow at Mansfield College in 2007. She was the President of the Institute of Physics from 2008 to 2010. In 2018, she became the Chancellor of the University of Dundee.
In 2018, she visited Parkes, NSW, Australia. She gave a special lecture there called the John Bolton lecture.
Helping Future Scientists
As mentioned, she won the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018. She received three million dollars for her discovery of radio pulsars. She gave all of this money away. She created the Bell Burnell Scholarship Fund. This fund helps women, minority groups, and refugee students become physics researchers. The Institute of Physics manages this fund.
In July 2022, Ulster Bank in Northern Ireland released a new £50 banknote. It features Jocelyn Bell Burnell and other women in science. She hopes this will encourage more women to study science. She believes it is important for Northern Ireland's growing science industry.
Awards and Honours
Jocelyn Bell Burnell has received many awards and honours for her work. Here are some of them:
- The Albert A. Michelson Medal (1973)
- J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize (1978)
- Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize (1986)
- Herschel Medal (1989)
- Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (2003)
- Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2004)
- The Royal Medal (2015)
- The Women of the Year Prudential Lifetime Achievement Award (2015)
- Grande Médaille of the French Academy of Sciences (2018)
- Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2018)
- Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (2021)
- The Royal Society's Copley Medal (2021)
- The Astronomische Gesellschaft's Karl Schwarzschild Medal (2021)
- The Prix Jules Janssen (2022)
- The Royal Irish Academy's Cunningham Medal (2023)
She was also made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1999. In 2007, she was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). This means she has the title "Dame."
In 2013, she was named one of the 100 most powerful women in the UK by BBC Radio 4. In 2014, she was elected President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was the first woman to hold this important position.
The Institute of Physics renamed one of their awards in her honour in 2016. It is now called the Jocelyn Bell Burnell Medal and Prize. It is given to female physicists who are just starting their careers.
A new type of sea slug, a nudibranch, was named after her. It is called Cadlina bellburnellae.
Personal Life and Beliefs
Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a house patron for Burnell House at Cambridge House Grammar School. She has worked hard to help more women get professional and academic jobs in physics and astronomy.
Her Quaker Faith
She has been an active member of the Quaker faith since she was young. She has held important roles within the Quaker community. She has also given lectures about her faith and how it connects with science.
In 2013, she wrote a book called A Quaker Astronomer Reflects: Can a Scientist Also Be Religious?. In this book, she talks about how her scientific knowledge of the universe relates to her Christian faith.
Family Life
In 1968, Jocelyn Bell married Martin Burnell. They later divorced in 1993. She has a son named Gavin Burnell. He is also a physicist.
She worked part-time for many years while raising her son. She once shared a story about wearing her engagement ring to the observatory. At the time, some people thought it was shameful for women to work if they were married. They thought it meant their husbands couldn't support the family. This shows some of the challenges women faced in the workplace.
Images for kids
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Bell Burnell in 2009
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Jocelyn Bell, June 1967
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This chart shows the first radio signal of a pulsar that Bell Burnell found.
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A combined image of the Crab Nebula, showing energy from a pulsar.
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Bell Burnell at an astronomy meeting in California, 1987.
See also
In Spanish: Jocelyn Bell Burnell para niños
- Timeline of women in science
- Nobel Prize controversies
