www.horoastronomy.org.nz
“Inspirational woman Scientist visiting Astronomers”
May 5th 2014
On 11th June ‘HASI’ will be hosting the eminent astrophysicist – Dame Prof Jocelyn Bell Burnell who is credited as being
the person who discovered Pulsars. This is a great honour for Horowhenua Astronomical Society Inc and will go down in
history as one of our greatest events. Dame Jocelyn is known to be an excellent, down to earth speaker and renowned
woman of science. She is also scheduled as Keynote speaker at the RASNZ 50th Annual Conference hosted by Whakatane
Astronomical Society from Friday 6th June to Sunday 8th June http://rasnz.org.nz/Conference/
In 1999 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to Astronomy and promoted to
Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2007. In February 2013 she was assessed as one of the 100
most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4. In February 2014 she was made President of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh, the first woman to hold that office.
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS, FRAS
Dame Jocelyn is a Northern Irish astrophysicist who as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars while
studying with Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Martin Ryle, while Bell Burnell was
excluded, despite having observed the pulsars. She was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004,
President of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010. Bell Burnell graduated from the University
of Glasgow with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Philosophy (physics) in 1965 and obtained a Ph.D. degree from
University of Cambridge in 1969. At Cambridge, she worked with Hewish and others to construct a radio telescope for
using interplanetary scintillation to study quasars, which had recently been discovered. In July 1967, she detected a
bit of "scruff" on her chartrecorder papers which tracked across the sky with the stars. Ms. Bell found that the signal
was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse per second. Temporarily dubbed "Little Green Man 1"
(LGM-1) the source (now known as PSR B1919+21) was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star.
Only about 1,000 pulsars are known to exist, though there may be hundreds of millions of old neutron stars in the
galaxy. The staggering pressures that exist at the core of neutron stars may be like those that existed at the time of
the big bang, but these states cannot be simulated on Earth.
The Speaker: Dame Prof Jocelyn Bell Burnell Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University Title of talk: “We are made
of star stuff” “Te Manawa” Museum Main Building, Palmerston North Wednesday 11th June 2014 6.30pm Start Admission: Gold
Coin
Further background:-
Talking about her discovery:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKtnaTxLARc
Women in science:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp7amRdr30Y
What are we made of?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBCM0oJR8F4
Wkipipedia Profile
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell
Academic:
https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/astro/people/SJocelynBellBurnell.htm
BBC Profile:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/universe/scientists/jocelyn_bell_burnell
www.horoastronomy.org.nz