So last time we talked about Ernest Walton the only Irish Winner of the Nobel prize for physics. But there is another Irish person who in the world of science is known nearly more for not winning the prize then her pioneering work that lead to a Nobel Prize. Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

Born in Belfast in 1943 her father was an architect for the Armagh Observatory. She went to school in Lurgan and failed the 11 plus subsequently she went to boarding school in York. She gained a Bsc from the University of Glasgow and a PhD from Cambridge in 1969.

For her PhD she was studying quasars. Quasar to most people is usually the name of the local laser quest venue played as a kid. But in fact it is a thing in space. Quasers are bright about 2 trillion times as bright as the sun and are thought to be matter around a black hole with the light being powered by gas falling into a blackhole. Basically this falling of matter into the blackhole heats up the gas to high temperatures causing it to admit. Anyway

While looking through some data that she had. She noticed a regular pulse in her data that repeated every second. It was noted as Little Green Men but was soon figured out to be a rapidly rotating neutron star a pulsar.

So what is a pulsar. Pulsars are not fully understood yet, and even less understood by this author. But basically they are Neutron Stars (which are massive stars made from mainly Neutrons) that rotate rapidly. As they rotate they admit a beam of radiation in a relatively tight beam. As this beam cross the path of the Earth we get to pick it up. (Mainly at radio frequencies). This regular pulsing happens between periods of 1.5 ms to 8.5 s. In the image on the left you can see the “lighthouse effect” of a pulsar as the emission sweeps out across the universe.

They wrote a paper telling of the discovery with her supervisor first author her second. In 1974 her supervisor Antony Hewish shared the prize with Martin Ryle won the Nobel prize.

“for their pioneering research in radio astrophysics: Ryle for his observations and inventions, in particular of the aperture synthesis technique, and Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars”

Now many people say that Hewish got the award for long time work in the field but many people have been critical saying that Bell should have won it. It is still a controversy to this day.

After her PhD she continued to work in various universities Southampton, Open, Edinburgh, London and Bath. Before retiring in 2004. From October 2008 she will serve as President of the Institute of Physics.