July 15, 1943 - Birth of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, discovered pulsars

Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born in Belfast on 15 July 1943. From an early age, she showed great interest in the cosmos and astronomy books. Her father, the architect of the Armagh Observatory (Astronomical Research Centre), offered her the opportunity to visit it.

After attending primary school in Northern Ireland, he continued his studies at Mount School boarding school in the English city of York. In 1965, he obtained a degree in physics from the University of Glasgow and then went to Cambridge to do his doctorate.

It was at Cambridge University that he met fellow researcher Anthony Hewish, with whom he spent two years building a radio telescope to observe quasars with other researchers.

In 1967, while analyzing the data taken by the telescope, he noticed some very regular and fast radio signals, unusual for quasars. He and Hewish continued to analyze the data and determined that the signals were coming from very massive stars rotating at high speed, which they called pulsars.

In 1974 Anthony Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery, a fact that caused great controversy among Bell's scientific colleagues who rightly felt that he should have shared the prize. However, Jocelyn, in an interview several years later, stated that he had no regrets as he felt that his life had been better without the prize.

During her career, Bell Burnell worked at the University of Southampton, where she began research in gamma-ray astronomy, at University College London, where she researched and taught X-ray astronomy, and at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, where she studied galaxies with the help of the EX0SAT satellite. She was also a visiting professor at Princeton University in the USA, Dean of Science at the University of Bath, and President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004. She is currently a visiting professor of astrophysics at Oxford University and a fellow of Mansfield College.