Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a PhD student at Cambridge University some five decades ago when she made an astronomical discovery while reviewing data from a radio telescope: faint, repeating pulses of radio waves.
These signals came to be known as pulsars, a type of neutron star described by Scientific American as “a city-sized collapsed core of a massive sun that is made of degenerate matter and throws off lighthouse-like beams of radio waves.” The discovery was a leap forward: It pointed to the existence of black holes, provided evidence for gravitational waves, and much more.
It also yielded a 1974 Nobel Prize—but not for Bell Burnell. Instead, the prize went to Antony Hewish, Bell Burnell’s PhD supervisor, the Guardian reports.
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