8 Ground-Breaking Discoveries You Didn't Know Were Made By Women

6. Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Discovered Pulsars

As a postgraduate student working with radio telescopes, Jocelyn Bell Burnell was devoted to the study of quasars. Quasars are hugely energetic objects (as in, they give off a lot of energy, rather than running around knocking over ornaments), that are thought to be formed when black holes or even whole galaxies collide. During the course of the research, Bell noticed some very odd readings coming through. In some regions of space, something was emitting a pulse of energy with alarmingly precise regularity. Bell jokingly labelled these as LGM-1, short for "Little Green Men" as these pulses were so regular that they seemed mechanical. It was eventually theorised that these pulsars were actually jets of electromagnetic radiation being fired out from an incredibly dense, incredibly fast-rotating neutron star. Each "pulse" represented the moment the jet swept across the Earth, like a lighthouse. They were called "Pulsars", short for "pulsating stars". This discovery was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974 but, you guessed it, Bell was left out of the award, and it went to her colleagues Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle instead. Despite this snub, Jocelyn Bell is now universally considered to be the person who discovered pulsars and was awarded a DBE in 2007.