Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell ( born July 15, 1943 in Belfast, Northern Ireland as Susan Jocelyn Bell) is a British radio astronomer. In 1967 she discovered along with Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle ( 1918-1984 ), the first a neutron star. Hewish and Ryle were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for this achievement in 1974.

Jocelyn Bell studied at Glasgow University and, after graduating in 1965 to Antony Hewish in Cambridge. When evaluating the data of the 1967 completed radio telescope arrays she noticed some signals, they then assigned cosmic objects - the pulsar PSR B1919 discovery of the first 21.

After her marriage with the government officials Martin Burnell in 1968, the year of her PhD, she moved to the Mullard Space Science Laboratory of Southampton, to be near her husband. She has held the chair of physics at the Open University in England since 1991.

Bell Burnell was not taken into account in the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics 1974 Anthony Hewish and Martin Ryle, over which much controversy has been conducted in the scientific community. In contrast, it had been a year earlier (1973 ) still excellent along with Hewish with the Michelson Medal of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Since 2003 Member of the Royal Society, Bell Burnell was awarded in June 2007 by Queen Elizabeth II as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and thus elevated to the personal nobility.

Awards

• Michelson Medal, Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, 1973
• J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize, Center for Theoretical Studies, Miami, 1978
• Beatrice M. Tinsley - Prize, American Astronomical Society, 1987
• Herschel Medal, Royal Astronomical Society, London, 1989
• Jansky Award, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 1995
• Order of the British Empire ( CBE) for services to astronomy, 1999
• Member of the Royal Society (FRS ), 2003
• Honorary doctorate from Harvard University (USA ), 2007
• Order of the British Empire (DBE ) for her services to astronomy, 2007
• Honorary doctorate from the University of Durham ( UK ), 2007
• President of the UK Institute of Physics ( UK ), 2008

More

• She was interviewed by the BBC broadcast Beautiful Minds
• In the documentary Break the Science Barrier the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, they will be interviewed and assessed their enormous contribution to science.