Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Appearances
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
The strong magnetic fields keeps the charged particles constrained. And having lots of energetic charged particles confined to a small volume and whizzing around like fury will likely give you radio waves. Which is a good thing because... Very, very few of them shine light. So we don't see them that way. We see them through the radio waves that they give out.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
You only see them if they shine in your face or into your radio telescope.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
Pulsar is an abbreviation for pulsating radio star. I'm Jocelyn Bell Burnell. I discovered the first pulsar in 1967 and the second one and the third and fourth in 1968.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
The real eureka moment for me was I was reading a book by Fred Hoyle where he was talking about these big galaxies, you know, 100,000 million stars. And Fred Hoyle in this book was talking about how these galaxies rotate, spin about their center.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
And we're learning about this in school, and Fred's talking about these galaxies with stars rotating, and what keeps them going around in a circle and not flying off into space. I think, wow, I like this physics. I could be an astronomer and do this for a job. Life was just a blank page for her to fill in. And then somebody pointed out to me the obvious. Astronomers work at night.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
And as a teenager, in fact, even still now, I'm useless if I stay up all night. They thought, oh, I can't be an astronomer.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
Bigger stars at the end of their life explode dramatically. They hugely brighten up. They kick out a whole lot of gas and stuff into space. And the core gets kicked against, gets compressed, gets shrunk right down.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
because the sun doesn't dominate the radio sky the way it dominates the light sky.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
I'm the person operating this radio telescope, looking for radio waves from stars and galaxies, particularly quasars, out there in space. I can't honestly remember what the definition was at the time I started, except that they were intriguing and mysterious.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
And I got the number up from 20 to 200. We now know that they're galaxy mass things, but they have a huge black hole in their center, which really dominates their behavior in many, many ways. And we probably know of thousands by now.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
But in amongst all the data, there's a little signal that doesn't make sense. And the first couple of times I see it, I log it with a question mark and it doesn't make sense.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
I found Cambridge when I was a grad student really quite scary. Everybody there seemed terribly clever, terribly confident. And I was quite sure they'd made a mistake admitting me. So I'm working very, very hard and thoroughly to justify my place there.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
I've got five or six sightings of this thing, all from the same bit of sky. And that implies it's something astronomical. You're probably aware that the constellations you see in the night sky in summer are different from the constellations in winter. That's because the stars go round in 23 hours, 56 minutes, not 24 hours.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
Well, this funny squiggle, whatever it was, was keeping to the 23 hour, 56 minute pattern. So it was keeping its place amongst the constellations, whatever it was.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
The way you get an enlargement is to run the paper faster underneath the pen, and it all gets spread out. An enlargement. So I had to go out to the observatory at the time this thing was due to be observed, switch over to high-speed chart recordings. And I did it for a month and nothing happened. My thesis advisor was livid. You know, it's been and gone and done it and you've missed it.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
And I went to the trouble of actually telephoning him to tell him the news. And he was rather disbelieving. But he came out the next day, stood as I wired up for this special observation, checked that I was doing everything properly. And bless it, it performed again. And he saw it with his own eyes. And we could see immediately it's pulsing at the same rate as yesterday.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
For something to keep pulsing steadily, it has to be big. But it also had quite sharp pulses, which meant it was small. So that was our conundrum, along with what the heck could it be and why is it going at this very fast rate of one and a third seconds?
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
At that time, there wasn't any way of keeping my maiden name, so I lost that as well and kind of lost my scientific reputation. And I married a person who had to move every five or ten years because of their job. And so my, quote, career, note the inverted commas, has been really, really peculiar.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
They're known as neutron stars. because they're largely composed of one of the fundamental particles that we call neutrons.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
I was begging for a job at the nearest astronomy place to where my husband was about to go and work.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
But it's actually worked out quite well. My curriculum vitae doesn't look too wonderful, but I have had huge fun working in many, many branches of astronomy, often landing in a new branch of astronomy just as it was about to boom. And I'm known for my work in several wavelengths. So, OK, I can live with that.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
The legacy. It's been a huge help to me through a rather difficult career that I've had the discovery of pulsars under my belt. Our understanding of the universe keeps evolving. Clearly, pulsars are one key component of that. There's a lot more work to do on pulsars. And I think there's plenty more unexpected things to trip over. If you keep your eyes open.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
And so the core of the star becomes a ball that's about 10 miles across, typically, and spinning very rapidly. A bit like the ice skater pulling her arms in. Spins faster.