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Journeys of Discovery: Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Pulsars

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Sitting in a field strung with 120 miles of radio telescope antennae, 24-year old PhD student Jocelyn Bell couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen something before.
The year was 1967. For two years, Jocelyn had helped solder and sledgehammer the antennae into place at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory just outside Cambridge. As she pored over her rolls of chart recordings, she noticed it again: a bit of "scruff", a “one part in 10 million” squiggle on a line. She had discovered pulsars, a previously unknown object in the universe.
The work resulted in a Nobel Prize (controversially, not to her), inspired the artwork on a Joy Division album cover, and led her to donate all of a £2.3 million prize to help underrepresented groups become physicists.
We talk to Jocelyn about her journey of discovery.
Category
Academic
Tags
Cambridge, Cambridge University, Jocelyn Bell Burnell
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