Jocelyn Bell Burnell

“Diversity adds to the creativity of a team, it brings an extra openness, and scientific breakthroughs are about taking data and when you come across something new, examining it open-mindedly.” - Jocelyn Bell Burnell

It was a man’s world when Jocelyn Bell Bell was born.

Her primary school banned girls from studying science, and later, as the only female undergraduate student at the University of Glasgow, the other male students in her class would stand up, jeer, and bang their desks at her. Little did anyone know that she would go on to lead more consequential lives than any in that same lecture room. 

Bell’s parents, G. Philip Bell and M. Allison Bell were educated Quakers who strongly believed in the importance of education no matter gender. With the support of her parents, Bell was able to study at a boarding school, where she was the first to overcome the ban against girls studying science. It was also through her father that Bell was first introduced to astronomy. Despite facing some form of discrimination from virtually every institution she learned from, Bell persevered and earned a B.S. degree in physics from the University of Glasgow and even pursued a PhD at Cambridge University. 

With very few women to turn to in her field and continuously scrutinized by the hostile, male-dominated science community, Jocelyn Bell began to doubt her worth and believed she didn’t belong at Cambridge University. Later, this syndrome would be labelled “imposter syndrome.” Driven by fear of an inevitable failure in her own mind, Bell worked tirelessly, poring over textbooks and thoroughly analyzing the smallest details of experiments even her supervisors would glaze over. Antony Hewish, a radio astronomer, noticed Bell and included her in his dissertation on strange objects in galaxies known as quasars.

The team assembled by Hewish included Bell, John Pilkington, Paul Scott, and Robin Collins. The four built an 81.5 megahertz radio telescope crucial in tracking quasars. Almost two years later, the telescope was complete. Bell took responsibility for perhaps one of the most tedious positions. She operated the telescope and analyzed the 120 meters of data on chart paper. The process was sensitive and critical to success. Bell’s thorough nature though, led to the findings that would secure a lasting legacy for the experiment. 

After weeks of analysis, Jocelyn Bell noticed small “bits of scruff” indicating unusually rapid radio signals. The signals were too fast and regular to have come from quasars, and Bell famously named them “Little Green Men (LGM)” after their alien identity and potential evidence of extraterrestrial life. When Bell alerted Hewish of the LGM, he dismissed them as “manmade artificial radio interference.” But Bell knew the signals weren’t manmade and were part of something greater. She continued to analyze and found evidence to prove the waves were coming from objects moving at the same speed as the stars, proving the waves were coming from something in space and not just human interference. The new evidence caught Hewish’s attention and convinced him to look more in-depth at the LGMs. 

The objects Bell and Hewish identified are known as pulsars. These rapidly spinning neutron stars emit radiation, providing an explanation for the unfamiliar waves Bell noticed in her data. The discovery of the pulsars sent waves through the science community. Pulsars were created by a completely novel object, behaving in unnatural ways astronomers never expected. 

In 1974, Hewish and Martin Ryle received the Nobel Prize for Physics for their “pioneering work in radio astrophysics” in the discovery of pulsars. Due to her status as a graduate student at the time and perhaps because she was a woman, Bell’s own efforts were overlooked despite the pivotal role she took in the discovery of pulsars. 

Dr. Bell continued to study the sky in “almost every region of the electromagnetic spectrum” since the legendary discovery of the pulsars, earning honours and awards for her lifelong works. Almost 50 years after noting the pulsars for the first time, Bell was awarded a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the largest monetary science prize in the world, giving her $3 million dollars. Bell donated her winnings to the UK’s Institution of Physics, funding the graduate scholarships of many scientists from under-represented groups. Today, Bell is an advocate for diversity in research and a critic of the “unconscious bias [in physics research jobs].” 

Written by Hayeon Kwak

Links to other resources:

NASA

Institute of Physics (IOP) 

University of Cambridge