Fifty years ago, Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars and changed our view of the universe
Fifty years ago Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars and changed our view of the universe:
In mid-1967, when thousands of people were enjoying the summer of love, a young PhD student at the University of Cambridge in the UK was helping to build a telescope.
It was a poles-and-wires affair what astronomers call a dipole array. It covered a bit less than two hectares, the area of 57 tennis courts.
By July it was built. The student, Jocelyn Bell (now Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell), became responsible for running it and analysing the data it churned out. The data came in the form of pen-on-paper chart records, more than 30 metres of them each day. Bell analysed them by eye.
What she found a little bit of scruff on the chart records has gone down in history.
Like most discoveries, it took place over time. But there was a turning point. On November 28, 1967, Bell and her supervisor, Antony Hewish, were able to capture a fast recording that is, a detailed one of one of the strange signals.