Word: jocelyne
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who as an astronomy student at Cambridge University in 1967 noticed the precisely timed signals from what were later identified as pulsars...
...summer of 1967, Jocelyn Bell, a graduate student at Cambridge University's Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, discovered that a radio telescope she was monitoring had picked up some curious signals from space. She called the beat-like pulses to the attention of Astronomer Antony Hewish, the senior scientist. Hewish's team at first suspected them to be signals from an extraterrestrial civilization. But further inquiry proved that pulsars, as the signal sources were named, were actually long-sought neutron stars, small and incredibly dense collapsed stars. So significant was the discovery to the understanding of stellar evolution that...
...award became embroiled in a bitter controversy. At a press conference at Montreal's McGill University, Britain's Sir Fred Hoyle, a noted astronomer, theoretician, science fiction writer (The Black Cloud) and scientific gadfly, had charged that Hewish "pinched" the prize for himself by failing to give Jocelyn Bell proper credit. Asked by a reporter if he considered it a scientific injustice to leave Bell out of the award, Hoyle replied: "Yes, I think it was a scientific scandal of major proportions...
...married, the mother of a two-year-old son and a part-time X-ray astronomer at the University of London, Jocelyn Bell Burnell acknowledges that she "made him [Hewish] aware of their sidereal nature and convinced him that it was worth looking into more closely." But she adds: "Nobel Prizes are based on longstanding research, not on a flash-in-the-pan observation of a research student. The award to me would have debased the prize...
Radio Beacon. Further observations by Hewish and other radio astronomers soon put this tantalizing speculation to rest but eventually confirmed that a pulsar is a neutron star. Space, in fact, seems to be full of neutron stars. Since Hewish and his assistant, Jocelyn Bell, found the first one, about 100 more have been identified by astronomers. A neutron star is a bizarre object. It is formed when a giant star exhausts its nuclear fuel and collapses inward on itself, crushing much of its matter into a ball of neutrons some ten miles in diameter-but so dense that a thimbleful...