Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell has devoted her life to studying the stars.
Many accolades
She has won many accolades throughout her career, including being the second woman to receive the Copley Medal, the highest award conferred by the Royal Society.
In 2018, she donated her prize money of £2.3 million from the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics towards helping underrepresented groups become physicists.
One of her most recent honours was Met Éireann naming Storm Jocelyn after her in January 2024. She says, “It’s been rather a bad few months for storms, but Storm Jocelyn was not one of the strongest I’m glad to say.”
Incredible discovery
Bell Burnell was born in Northern Ireland in 1943. She moved across the water to Great Britain at age 13, and has stayed there ever since, following the path of her education and career. In 1967, after building a huge telescope that took up a space about the equivalent of 57 tennis courts, she made an incredible discovery.
“When I was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, I was working towards a PhD in radio astronomy, detecting radio waves from stars and galaxies and things. I spent the first two years building the equipment, and the third and final year analysing the data from the new radio telescope. This proved rather more exciting than anybody had anticipated, because we found a totally new kind of star,” says Bell Burnell.
Sticking with astronomy
The discovery of this star led to a Nobel Prize, although controversially not for Bell Burnell, a decision she has always been at peace with. Since the discovery, she has moved around several universities, but has always stuck with the field of astronomy.
Of the Presidential Distinguished Services Award Bell Burnell says, “It was a very great honour — still is a very great honour! I received it out of the blue, and it was lovely to get this acknowledgment.”
Connection to Northern Ireland
She says she still feels connected to Northern Ireland, although with little family there now and having lived out of the country for almost 70 years, she says she can feel a sense of distance.
However, things like being a member of the Royal Irish Academy keep her in touch with Ireland. And she says of the PDSA: “I think the award gave me a sense of recognition and strengthened my links with Ireland, which I very much appreciate.”