What did Jocelyn Bell Burnell actually discover?

She discovered the first pulsating neutron star, or "pulsar". Her name was Jocelyn Bell at that time.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a British astrophysicist who made a significant discovery during her doctoral research at the University of Cambridge in the late 1960s. More specifically, she discovered a celestial object known as a "pulsar."

To understand what a pulsar is, it is important to know that it is a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star. Neutron stars are extremely dense objects that are formed from the remnants of massive stars that have gone supernova.

Now, let's talk about how Jocelyn Bell Burnell actually made this discovery. She was working with a radio telescope known as the "Interplanetary Scintillation Array" (or "Interplanetary scintillation method") that was designed to study quasars, which are another type of astronomical object. While analyzing the radio signals picked up by the telescope, she noticed some unusual signals that displayed a regular, repeating pattern.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell initially thought that these signals might be caused by some interference or human-made sources, but after careful analysis and elimination of other possibilities, she concluded that these signals were of natural origin. This was a groundbreaking discovery because it was the first time pulsars had been observed and identified.

The discovery of pulsars opened up new possibilities in astrophysics and allowed scientists to investigate various aspects of stellar evolution, the behavior of matter under extreme conditions, and the nature of space-time itself. For her discovery, Jocelyn Bell Burnell played a crucial role and was recognized for her work, although at the time the Nobel Prize was awarded to her advisors, Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle, in 1974.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell's discovery is not only important for its scientific significance but also for breaking barriers as a female scientist in a male-dominated field. Her work has since been widely celebrated, and she has become an inspirational figure for aspiring scientists, particularly women, around the world.