Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Becoming an astrophysicist

In this edition of Titans of Science, Chris Smith sits down with Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the astrophysicist who's work detecting cosmic radio waves helped discover the existence of pulsars...

Chris - Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, more accurately, was born on the 15th of July, 1943 in Lurgan County Armagh. She attended Lurgan College and then Mount School, which was a quaker girls' boarding school in York, and then went to read Natural Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Jocelyn began her postgraduate studies in Cambridge in the late 1960s, where at the age of just 24, she discovered the phenomenon of pulsars. These are celestial entities that emit bursts of radio waves and other forms of electromagnetic radiation. And those findings led to a Nobel Prize, although not for her, and also inspired a famous Joy Division album cover, one of the best known record covers, apart from Pink Floyd with Dark Side of the Moon, ever. And since then, Jocelyn served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society, president of the Institute of Physics. She was the chancellor of the University of Dundee. And in 2021, she was awarded the Royal Society's prestigious Copley Medal, which is given annually for sustained outstanding achievements in any field of science. And I'm very delighted to say she's with me today in Cambridge. Hello Jocelyn.

Jocelyn - Hello. Good to be with you.

Chris - You are back here in Cambridge. This is where it really sort of started in a big way for you, isn't it? What was it like doing radio astronomy?

Jocelyn - Very masculine, shall we say, <laugh>. And considerable anxiety amongst the female dons, the female academics, that if we, the female students, didn't behave, there's a risk that the men would say, 'huh, trust a woman. No more women in Cambridge.'

Chris - What about the science though? What was the situation with the topic you had chosen to study and why did you go into it?

Jocelyn - I became interested in astronomy as a teenager. I was good at science at school, especially physics. There was a glitch when it suddenly dawned on me, you do astronomy at night and I like my bed, I like my sleep. And then I got to hear of astronomy at other wavelengths where the sun doesn't interfere in the same way. And in particular radio astronomy, which you can do day and night. So from my mid-teens, I was saying, I want to be a radio astronomer.

Chris - Tell us about that. Because it's not obvious to many people that you can do astronomy with forms of light that are not the forms we can see, that normally you would observe as a colour. So tell us how that works.

Jocelyn - Our eyes are actually extremely limited. We see a very narrow range of wavelengths, of frequencies. There's things like ultraviolet and infrared that we don't see. And if you go even further away from the bits we see, you find radio astronomy out the red end of the spectrum. And if you go out the blue end violet end of the spectrum, you come to ultraviolet, x-ray, gamma ray. So there are many other kinds of radiations like light. Indeed, strictly speaking, light is a minority of all the possible radiations. But because it's what we are attuned to work with, we think it's the big thing.

Chris - What does it unlock, looking with those other wavelengths or colours of light we can't see, that we can't see with visible light?

Jocelyn - Well, visible light can be blocked quite easily. Dust for instance, will cut out visible light. You may have seen on foggy days how limited the sunlight is. So if we're able to study the universe in all these other wavelengths, then if about 10% that is light is blocked for some reason, we still have some chance of studying those objects.

Chris - And how advanced was that field in the 1960s when you came here to do your studies, your postgraduate studies, your PhD? How far ahead were we? What was our kind of understanding of what the universe looked like in those realms at that time?

Jocelyn - Radio astronomy had started post World War II. Indeed, there is a story that the Japanese were puzzled, during the war, were puzzled by something blocking the radar. It was low in the east in the morning, high in the south in the middle of the day, and low in the west. In the evening. It was actually the sun. The sun, when it's got lots of sunspots, can give out radio waves, which could block the Japanese radar. But post World War II, radio astronomy really took off. Studying the radio waves, not just from the sun, but from lots of other stars and galaxies and quasars and molecules in space and all sorts of things it's developed into.