THE STORY BEHIND - Manna's puzzle on the History of Science

31.

Biography

She started her PhD at Cambridge University in 1965, helping to build a radio telescope that was to be used to study radio waves from outer space. The telescope was operating successfully by 1967, recording any incoming radio waves on a pen recorder and generating several metres of chart paper every day. One day she noticed that there was a ‘signal’ on the chart paper, which pulsed every 1.3 seconds It was as if an alien in outer space were sending a signal to Earth, so she called the signal LGM, short for “Little Green Man”. Then she and her supervisor Antony Hewish discovered a second radio signal, coming from the other side of the universe and pulsing every 1.2 seconds. She soon realised that she had accidentally discovered a new type of star, which had been predicted in the 1930s – the pulsating star (or pulsar) was a dense sphere of neutrons that rotated very fast, sending out beams of radio waves like a lighthouse.

Who discovered pulsars?

1.	Jocelyn Bell Burnell
2.	Nancy Roman
3.	Margaret Geller

Author: Simon Singh

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Jocelyn Bell Burnell (born 1943)
Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967, while using a radio telescope based in Cambridge. She was trying to study quasars when she stumbled upon this new type of star.