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Dame Burnell Research Paper

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“For me, being a role model was important, just to show there are women doing science, enjoying it and being good at it.” Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell said that herself. Dame Burnell was and is one of the most important astrophysicists and astronomers from the 20th century. She has had an amazing life, with revolutionary work. It is appropriate for her to be retired now. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on July 15th, 1942. Her parents (who are both deceased) are M. Allison Bell, her mother, and G. Philip Bell, her father, who was an architect. Her father co designed the Armagh Planetarium. That’s when she found her father’s books on astronomy. She spent the rest of her kid years and her teen years in Lurgan, …show more content…

Tillot (she was his favorite student). Eventually, she attended Lurgan College. Originally, girls were not allowed to study science until parents and students boycotted that policy. In 1965, Dame Bell Burnell graduated from the “University of Glasgow” with a BSc degree in Natural Philosophy. In 1969, she graduated from the “University of Cambridge” with a PhD degree in Natural Philosophy. At Cambridge, she attended New Hall. She worked with Anthony Hewish and others to make a 81.5 radio telescope, which she also operated. It was used to study the recently discovered quasars (distant objects powered by black holes a billion times as massive as our sun), by using interplanetary scintillation (radio counterpart of optical twinkling of stars). In 1967, she found what she described as a bit of “scruff” on her chart recorder papers. Dame Bell Burnell discovered that the signal was pulsating consistently and regularly. What was temporarily called “Little Green Man 1” (now called PSR B1919+21), was really a speedily rotating neutron star. She had helped discover pulsars. This was reported by the BBC Horizon series. A big controversy in the science world that included Dame Bell Burnell was the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize in Physics. Not only did she build, create, and operate the radio

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