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Date: November 25, 1997
Jocelyn Bell Burnell to Offer Hamilton Lecture: "In Pursuit of Pulsars -- 30 Years On!"
PRINCETON, N.J. -- Jocelyn Bell Burnell, chair of the department of physics at The Open University in Milton Keynes, England, will offer the 23rd annual Donald Ross Hamilton Memorial Lecture on Tuesday, December 9, at 8 p.m. in Jadwin Hall, room A-10. Her topic is "In Pursuit of Pulsars -- 30 Years On!"
Thirty years ago, a small group of radio astronomers at Cambridge University were trying to understand regular pulsations appearing in their newly constructed radio telescope, which did not look like any celestial radio source ever seen or predicted. Then a graduate student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell set out to investigate the apparently implausible idea that the pulses might nevertheless be coming from the sky. The subsequent discovery of radio pulsars earned Bell Burnell's thesis adviser, Antony Hewish, the 1974 Nobel Prize in physics.
The Cambridge radio astronomers considered several explanations for the source of the radio pulses, including extraterrestrials. As it turned out, they had discovered a class of stars called neutron stars. These had been described theoretically in 1939, but their odd characteristics -- neutron stars are four times more massive than the sun, but much smaller -- led few astronomers to expect to find them in nature. Princeton's Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse used a double neutron star system to measure the effects of gravitational radiation for the first time, earning the Nobel Prize for physics in 1993.
After receiving her Ph.D., Bell Burnell worked in X-ray astronomy at University College London and gamma-ray astronomy at Edinburgh's Royal Observatory. Since 1991, Bell Burnell has been professor of physics and chair of the Department of Physics at The Open University. Besides teaching and research, Bell Burnell is known as a speaker and broadcaster, and she frequently works with school children. She has been awarded numerous prizes by learned societies in the United States and the United Kingdom, including the Oppenheimer prize, the Michelson medal, the Tinsley prize, and the Herschel Medal. She holds honorary degrees from seven universities and an Honorary Fellowship in New Hall, her former college at Cambridge University.
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