Blog post: ajb: Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is one of the UK’s most powerful women.

BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour announced its list of the 100 most powerful women in the UK on Tuesday 12 February. The list included a number of other high profile scientists and engineers including Professor Bell Burnell.

Prof S Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Professor Sir Peter Knight, President of IOP

Pulsars

Prof. Bell Burnell is credited with the discovery of the first radio pulsar (PSR B1919+21), while a postgraduate student under the supervision of Antony Hewish. Interestingly, the regular radio signal detected in 1967 that lead to the discovery of the first pulsar was given the designation LGM-1. That stands for "little green men". The signal was so regular it was initially thought it could not be natural!

S. Jocelyn Bell Burnell. "Little Green Men, White Dwarfs or Pulsars?". Annals of the New York Academy of Science, vol. 302, pages 685-689, Dec., 1977

It took the powerful mind of Fred Hoyle to realise that these signals came from neutron stars with strong magnetic fields.

Controversially, she was not a co-recipient of the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics along side Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle, which was awarded for pulsar research.

Academic activities

Prof. Bell Burnell was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002-2004 and president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010. She was also interim president following the death of her successor, Marshall Stoneham, in early 2011.

Links

Past-president makes Woman’s Hour power list IOP News

The power list BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour

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