Discover Dead Stars with Dame Bell Burnell

In this episode of the Broadcast Monologues, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell narrates her inadvertent discovery of pulsars: dense, rotating neutron stars—a death state of collapsed stars—that emit swinging beams of light, like astrophysical lighthouses. Born into a family keen on education, Jocelyn battled for her right as a young student in Ireland to learn science beside her male peers. Having developed a particular enthusiasm for astronomy, she attended the University of Glasgow, where her presence as a female student in physics lectures was an anomaly. Nevertheless, she excelled. Driven by curiosity and badgered by imposter syndrome, she strove on. Admitted as a PhD student to Cambridge University, she joined a prestigious group headed by Professor Anthony Hewish—today a Nobel laureate. There, in 1967, while operating a radio telescope built to detect quasars, she encountered an inexplicable signal in her data: the defiant, metronomic impression of a neutron star. The discovery also rendered the implausible—black holes—suddenly plausible.

Animator Micah Ganske provides an ethereal visual context for Bell Burnell’s personal story. ♦