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This is a photo of the chart on which Burnell first recognised evidence of a pulsar. It is a yellowed scroll of paper, with small squares and numbers to find interferences & record them correctly. There are red squiggly lines indicating the radio signal. In black ink, Burnell shows the exact points at which the signal quivered differently than normal - these are hard to see. The map is display at the University of Cambridge Library.

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This is a photo of the chart on which Burnell first recognised evidence of a pulsar. It is a yellowed scroll of paper, with small squares and numbers to find interferences & record them correctly. There are red squiggly lines indicating the radio signal. In black ink, Burnell shows the exact points at which the signal quivered differently than normal - these are hard to see. The map is display at the University of Cambridge Library.
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mythologyandhistory (mythologyandhistory@mas.to)'s status on Saturday, 04-Oct-2025 15:58:17 JST mythologyandhistory

It's 1967 & she's 24 years old. It had taken her 3 months to go through the chart-recorder paper manually. She had helped build the radio #telescope that picked up the waves. There was a pulsating signal, regular; it turned out to be a #pulsar.
Her supervisor didn't believe her. She insisted it's real.
It was. But the press would ask her about boyfriends. Her male colleagues were asked about science.
7 years later, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell
would be excluded from the #Nobel Prize of #Physics.

In conversation about 8 months ago from mas.to permalink