Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell:
“An Introduction to Pulsars”

Dame (Susan) Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS, FRAS is a Northern Irish astrophysicist. As a postgraduate student, she discovered the first radio pulsars and became world renowned as a result.  Bell Burnell was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004 and president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010.

In July 1967, she detected a bit of “scruff” on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars. Ms. Bell found that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse per second. Temporarily dubbed “Little Green Man 1” (LGM-1) the source (now known as PSR B1919+21) was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star.

In 1991, she was appointed as a Professor of Physics at the Open University, a position that she held for ten years. She was also a visiting professor at Princeton University in the United States. She is currently a Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Mansfield College.

Her personal mini- biog follows:

Jocelyn Bell Burnell inadvertently discovered pulsars as a graduate student in radio astronomy in Cambridge, opening up a new branch of astrophysics – work recognised by the award of a Nobel Prize to her supervisor.

She has subsequently worked in many roles in many branches of astronomy, working part-time while raising a family. She is now a Visiting Professor in Oxford.

In her spare time she gardens, listens to choral music and is active in the Quakers. She has co-edited an anthology of poetry with an astronomical theme – ‘Dark Matter; Poems of Space’.