Excerpt from "She made the discovery, but a man got the Nobel. A half-century later, she’s won a $3 million prize," posted on the Washington Post Online, September 8, 2018.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell built the telescope, laboring in damp and chilly English weather to install more than 100 miles of cable and copper wire across a windswept field near Cambridge. She operated the instruments and analyzed the data, poring over miles of chart paper etched with the inked recordings of galactic radio waves.
And, in 1967, when she spotted the first four light sources with repeated pulses beating a steady rhythm against the background noise of the stars, it was Bell Burnell who realized she'd detected something important. She had discovered the swiftly spinning cores of collapsed stars, whose powerful magnetic fields produce jets of radiation that flash across the sky like the rotating beam of a lighthouse.
The objects, called pulsars, are among the most important astronomical finds of the 20th century — potent tools for testing physics, probing space-time and investigating the dark regions of the universe.
On Thursday, half a century after her pioneering work, it was announced that Bell Burnell will receive a $3 million Breakthrough Prize, one of the most lucrative and prestigious awards in science. The special award in fundamental physics, given for her scientific achievements and “inspiring leadership,” has only been granted three times before.
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