2023-05-01 05:00:00
Black holes, quasars, magnetars, wandering stars… the Universe is full of strange astronomical objects whose discovery and observation expand our knowledge of the Cosmos a little more every day. One of these objects, which had remained hidden from human intuition until 1967, are called pulsars or neutron starsbehind whose discovery lies in the name of a brilliant scientist: we are talking about Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born on July 15, 1943 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he grew up with his three brothers in a small country house. His love for the cosmos was forged during his childhood, possibly during the years when his father, an architect by profession, worked on the expansion of the Armagh Observatory, where the budding little scientist grew up surrounded and influenced by astronomy books.
Magnetars, the most powerful neutron stars in the Universe
After two attempts to enter the school, one of them at too young an age, Bell Burnell would begin her academic life at the private girls’ Mount School, in the city of York. He continued with his higher studies at the University of Glasgow, where he would graduate in physics at the age of 22, in 1965. Later he would enter the University of Cambridge, where he received a doctorate in radio astronomy in 1969, and it was precisely at this time. in which Bell would contribute significantly to some of the most important discoveries of the time in his field.
In fact, Bell’s doctoral work would consist of the construction of a radiotelescopio which was intended to study the quasarsvery intense sources of celestial radiation that may pass for stars, but are actually some of the most luminous galaxies and farthest from our position in the Universe.
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Quasars had been discovered only a few years earlier, in 1950. Bell Burnell was working on data from his telescope when, for the first time, one day in 1967, he discovered a series of extremely regular radio pulses. Puzzled, she consulted her thesis director, the radio astronomer Anthony Hewish, after which they spent the following months eliminating possible sources of the strange radio pulses found, of very short duration and extremely regular.
In fact, the signals detected by Bell were so exotic to scientists at the time that both she and Hewish, due to their accuracy and regularity, thought that they might be looking at the signal of some form of extraterrestrial life, so they were tempted. to name their radiation source as LGMan acronym for “Little Green Men“, or little green men in its translation into Spanish; that is, they thought that it could be the signs of an extraterrestrial civilization.
However, by continuing to analyze the data, they discovered three new sources that emitted radio at different frequencies, so they soon concluded that it must be a natural phenomenon. In fact, this phenomenon was produced by what we now know as a pulsatethat is to say, a neutron star that spins very fast and is highly magnetized.
Courtesy of the Cavendish Laboratory.
The discovery by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish was collected in an article in the magazine Nature which had a profound echo in the field of astronomy, and what began 50 years ago as a note on a piece of paper has today become one of the most fascinating fields of astrophysics.
In fact, the revelation of this new type of stars, the pulsars, earned those who at the time were recognized as their discoverers, Antony Hewish y Martin Ryleanother of the radio astronomers that made up the Hewish team, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, however, was excluded from the award due to her student status, something that sparked great controversy, as well as protest from many of her colleagues within the scientific community.
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Bell, however, has agreed in subsequent years with the decision made by the academy and on one occasion stated that “I would demote Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I don’t think that this be one of them”, a position in which many have wanted to see the call imposter Syndrome, a psychological phenomenon in which the subject is unable to accept his achievements for fear of being discovered as a fraud.
After finishing her doctorate, the astrophysicist would marry the diplomat Martin Burnell, which will remove it from the front line of scientific research. During the following years her academic career would take place between the universities of Southampton, University College London and the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh, where she would specialize and excel in various fields of astrophysics. In 1986, she became the project manager for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, after which she went through various universities and became president of the Royal Astronomical Society of London in 2002, a position she performance up to 2004.
A new astronomical phenomenon
Despite not receiving the Nobel Prize, Bell’s recognition by his professional colleagues has been a constant throughout his entire career, and this has been evident with dozens of awards, including some of such prestige as the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society or the Medalla Copleyand numerous honorary titles, such as Commander of the Order of the British Empire or member of the Royal Society.
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