British astrophysicist overlooked by Nobels wins $3m award for pulsar work

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/06/jocelyn-bell-burnell-british-astrophysicist-overlooked-by-nobels-3m-award-pulsars

British astrophysicist overlooked by Nobels wins $3m award for pulsar work

Ian Sample Science editor

Thu 6 Sep 2018 05.01 BST

A British astrophysicist who was passed over for the Nobel prize for her discovery of exotic cosmic objects that light up the heavens has won the most lucrative award in modern science.

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a visiting professor at Oxford University, was chosen by a panel of leading scientists to receive the $3m (£2.3m) special Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics for her landmark work on pulsars and a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community.
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Bell Burnell was born in Lurgan, Northern Ireland, in 1943, and after spells in York and Glasgow arrived in Cambridge “rather by accident” to pursue a PhD at the university’s Cavendish laboratory. While poring over literally miles of data from a new radio telescope she helped to build, she spotted a faint and unusual signal: repeating pulses of radio waves.
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In the hope of capturing a better signal, Bell Burnell went back to the observatory and took more data from the same region of sky that the radio waves had come from. To her dismay the signal had disappeared. Then, after a month of patient observations, the signal sprang to life once more.

With the fresh signals in hand, Bell Burnell phoned her PhD supervisor, Antony Hewish. “He said, ‘That settles it, it’s manmade, it’s artificial radio interference.’” In the mid-60s, radio telescope observations were plagued with interference from passing cars, pirate radio stations and even arc welding equipment. “I couldn’t marshall the arguments fast enough, but I knew that it wasn’t interference,” said Bell Burnell.She was right. The radio waves were coming from a source that moved across the sky at the same speed as the stars, meaning that, like them, it appeared in the same position at a time that advanced by four minutes each day. That, and other quirks of the signal, ruled out a source on Earth. “It had to be something among the stars,” she said.

Having also ruled out broadcasts from “little green men”, Bell Burnell gathered more observations until eventually she found three more repeating pulses of radio waves emanating from different spots in the galaxy. At the time, the researchers were unsure what produced the signals. Today they are known as pulsars: spinning neutron stars that can be tens of miles across and yet weigh more than the sun. As pulsars spin, they release intense beams of radio waves that sweep around the heavens like beams from a cosmic

The discovery was so dramatic it was awarded the Nobel prize in 1974. But while Hewish was named as a winner, Bell Burnell was not. The decision drew vocal criticism from the British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, but Bell Burnell has not complained.
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The special Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics is backed by Silicon Valley moguls includingMark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Yuri Milner, a former physicist who became a billionaire from investments in tech firms. The prize has previously been awarded to Stephen Hawking, researchers at Cern who discovered the Higgs boson, and physicists on the Ligo experiment who detected gravitational waves.
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