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When and how were pulsars
discovered?
33 years ago, in 1967, while studying stars at the Cambridge Observatory
with a radio telescope, Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish stumbled upon
something in space emitting quick pulses of radio waves. Nothing had ever
been detected in space that gave off such rapid bursts of radio waves, one
every second. First thought to be a satellite, that theory was debunked a
few days later, because the object was stationary, and not orbiting around
the Earth or anything else in our solar system. When several more were
found, they were labelled 'pulsars' because of the rapid pulses they emit.
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Jocelyn Bell Burnell, born in Belfast, Ireland in 1943, failed a
test when she was 11, which was supposed to examine if one could go
on to higher education. She later went to a boarding school, which
gave her a second chance, and passed high school. She then was a
physics student at Glasgow University, and left to be a graduate
student at Cambridge University, where she made the discovery of
pulsars. Later, she married and became a professor of physics at the
Open University. |
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Anthony Hewish, born in Cornwall, England, was the youngest of 3
boys. He went to school at king's college, and went to the
University of Cambridge in 1942. He joined the army for 3 years
after that, and returned to Cambridge in 1946. He became a
researcher in radio astronomy, and in 1967, he and one of his
students, Jocelyn Bell, discovered the pulsar. He later received the
Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the pulsar. |
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