In 1967 Jocelyn Bell Burnell made a discovery that revolutionized the field of astronomy. She detected the radio signals emitted by certain dying stars called pulsars. This encore episode: Jocelyn's story. Host Regina G. Barber talks to Jocelyn about her winding career, her discovery and how pulsars are pushing forward the field of astronomy today.Have cosmic queries and unearthly musings? Contact us at [email protected]. We might open an intergalactic case file and reveal our findings in a future episode.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Jocelyn Bell Burnell knows that in space, just as in life, nothing lasts forever.
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.
Massive stars more than 20 times bigger than our sun eventually collapse into black holes. Infinitely small points of immense mass that we can't directly see. Then there are smaller stars, still bigger than our sun, that don't fully collapse into black holes.
They're known as neutron stars. because they're largely composed of one of the fundamental particles that we call neutrons.
Those neutrons? They were created when the pressure from the explosion compressed the protons and electrons so tightly together, they combined.
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.
A chunk of a neutron star the size of just a sugar cube would weigh a billion tons on Earth. Or no big deal about the weight of a mountain. And because of that compression, these stars have much stronger magnetic fields.
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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