Just like Rosalind Franklin before her, Jocelyn Bell Burnell narrowly missed out on a Nobel Prize. However, the results of her research were not immediately attributed to her, in accordance with the Matilda Effect theorized by historian of science Margaret Rossiter, which suggests that the contribution of female scientists to research is often minimized in favor of men.
Born in July 1943, Jocelyn Bell Burnell developed a keen interest in astronomy at a young age when she accompanied her father to the Armagh Observatory. It was only natural that she pursued a career in science, and after obtaining her degree from the University of Glasgow in 1965, she began her studies in radio astronomy at the University of Cambridge. There, she participated in the construction of a radio telescope designed to study quasars, under the direction of British astronomer Anthony Hewish.
In 1967, the telescope was completed and Jocelyn Bell Burnell was tasked with analyzing the data captured by the instrument. While examining the recordings - more than 30 meters of paper were printed every day - Jocelyn Bell noticed anomalies that did not correspond to typical quasar patterns.
In the program "Dialogues of the Sky and Life" in 2006, Hubert Reeves recounted this discovery:
Jocelyn Bell, operating a radio telescope, detects strange signals in a region of the sky. Instead of the usual static, she discovers a very regular sequence of "beep beep beep". 30 beeps per second. It resembles ultra-fast morse code. Could this be a coded message from a celestial source? A long-awaited sign of extraterrestrial life?
She then reports her discovery to Anthony Hewish. "It cannot be said that she was really supported by her boss," recalls astrophysicist Yaël Nazé, in an episode of La Marche des sciences dedicated to women in astronomy:
Jocelyn Bell made this discovery during her thesis, which she did under the order of Anthony Hewish, but he had ordered her to focus on Quasars, which she did. Studying this, she found the pulsars. But it cannot be said that she was really supported by her boss, which is known in England. Anthony Hewish first told her that it was extraterrestrials, calling us... which she was not convinced of, of course. She was convinced that they were objects similar to beacons. Which is what pulsars are, indeed.
Nevertheless, Jocelyn Bell Burnell goes against the will of her thesis supervisor and deepens her own research. She then discovers pulsars, neutron stars that rotate very rapidly on themselves emitting a significant electromagnetic radiation: the famous regular "beep beep" that the astrophysicist has spotted.
When, in February 1968, the result of Jocelyn Bell's research was published in the journal Nature, the first signature that appeared was that of Anthony Hewish, Jocelyn Bell's thesis supervisor. That same year, she obtained her doctorate, and her discovery earned her a brilliant reputation in the field.
However, in 1974, it was Anthony Hewish who was rewarded, with Martin Ryle, the Nobel Prize in Physics. Part of the scientific community then protested the "omission" of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, as Yaël Nazé recalled:
There was a fairly violent reaction from the community, which said that it was not normal for her not to be at least associated. Anthony Hewish did not even give her the order to take care of it: she made the discovery by chance, she delved into it on her own, she went against the will of her boss... It didn't change anything, but nevertheless, within the astronomical community and beyond, she is officially known as the one who discovered pulsars.
As a philosopher, Jocelyn Bell Burnell recalls that she did not yet have a degree at the time of the discovery and prefers to joke about it in the BBC documentary "Beautiful Minds":
You can currently do extremely well without having won a Nobel Prize, and I have had many other prizes, and so many rewards and honors that, in reality, I think I had much more fun than if I had won the Nobel Prize. It's kind of a flash in the pan: you have it, you're happy for a week, and then it's all over, no one gives you anything else afterwards, because there's a feeling that nothing can be at the same level.
Since then, Jocelyn Bell has indeed received numerous awards, including the Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize in Astronomy in 1986, the Women of the Year Prudential Award in 2015, and the 2018 Grande Médaille of the French Academy of Sciences.
Her story is reminiscent of that of Henrietta Leavit, who discovered, while working as a computer at Harvard University Observatory, the relationship between the brightness of stars and their period of variation, which notably made it possible to measure the distance between Earth and other galaxies. Her calculations then allowed Edwin Hubble to prove his theory of the expansion of the universe. He himself stated on several occasions that Leavitt deserved the Nobel Prize.