1967 Discovered the first radio pulsars

In 1967 Bell Burnell, as a postgraduate student at Cambridge, detected a "bit of scruff" on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars. The signal had been visible in data taken in August, but as the papers had to be checked by hand, it took her three months to find it. She established that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse every one and a third seconds. Temporarily dubbed "Little Green Man 1" (LGM-1) the source was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star. Controversially, Bell did not receive recognition in the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics. She helped build the Interplanetary Scintillation Array over two years and initially noticed the anomaly. Bell later said that she had to be persistent in reporting the anomaly in the face of skepticism from her thesis supervisor Hewish, who initially insisted it was due to interference and man-made. In later years, she opined that "the fact that I was a graduate student and a woman, together, demoted my standing in terms of receiving a Nobel prize." The decision to exclude her continues to be debated to this day.

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Category:
Astronomy - Astrophysics

Completion Status:
yes

Patent Number:
N/A

Co-Inventor:
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