This Day in Science History - July 15 - Jocelyn Bell

July 15th is Jocelyn Bell Burnell's birthday. She is an Irish astrophysicist who discovered the first four pulsars. She was a doctoral student under Antony Hewish who built a radio telescope array on 4 1/2 acres of English countryside. Miss Bell was put in charge of the operation of the telescope and the analyzing of the data it collected. She was originally looking for quasars, but found a repeating radio source that did not look like any man-made interference. The signal repeated every 1 1/3 seconds. After ruling out any interference or instrument malfunctions, the idea that maybe it was a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization became a sort of joke among them, even to the point of labeling the signal LGM-1 or Little Green Men - 1. Four different radio sources were discovered that would be determined to be a form of neutron star that would eventually be called a pulsar.

Antony Hewish would be awarded half the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering pulsars. Miss Bell would get her PhD and an early success in the young field of radio astronomy. Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.

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