Jocelyn (Susan)Bell Burnell An important woman in the contribution of science is Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She is aBritish astronomer that discovered pulsars, which is a tiny, very dense, rapidly rotating neutronstar that appear to emit radiation in pulses.Jocelyn was born in 1943 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She was raised near the ArmaghObservatory, which obviously impacted her life She graduated from Glasgow University in 1965with a B.S. degree in Physics, and in 1968 she received a Ph.D. in radio astronomy from theUniversity of Cambridge in 1968. Jocelyn began her studies by conducting experiments ofgamma-ray astronomy at the University of Southampton. From 1974 through 1982, Jocelynworked in X-ray astronomy at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at the University College inLondon. In 1982 she became a senior research fellow at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh,Scotland, working with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and also did astrophysicalresearch in the optical and infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum until 1991.Her discovery came from the initial research at Cambridge, where she built a radiotelescope to track quasars, which are starlike objects that have a large red shift, emit powerfulblue light, and can often emit radio waves. Then in 1967, while using the radio telescope, therewas an unexpected discovery, which she shared among with Antony Hewish and othercolleagues. Jocelyn noticed that there was a source of regular, intense pulses of radio waves thatemitted a burst every 1.337 seconds. At first, there was an attempted explanation that thisphenomenon might be a beacon from alien sources, so they initially named the pulsing sourceLGM or “Little Green Men”. After a few months, however, the astronomer had discovered anumber of other sources in distant space and deduced from their far away locations and othercharacteristics, that these pulses must be occurring naturally. Then Jocelyn and he...
