Jocelyn Bell Burnell · Pulsars
A perfectly regular signal — did someone send it?
That time, that place
A graduate student at Cambridge. Her first task was not reading papers but building a telescope: two years driving stakes into a field and joining kilometers of cable by hand.
Once it ran, paper poured out — signals traced by a pen onto a moving chart, some thirty meters of it a day.
Why this question
She scanned that paper by eye. Kilometers of it.
And she found a very small trace — something odd occupying less than a thousandth of the record. Small enough to pass over.
She did not pass over it. Reobserving at a faster chart speed, it resolved into a pulse repeating precisely every 1.34 seconds.
What was found
The trouble was that it was too regular.
Nothing in nature was known to keep such exact time. So they suspected an artificial source — human interference, or something someone had sent.
Half in jest, they labeled it Little Green Men 1.
Soon she found the same kind of signal from other directions in the sky. Several parties would not be transmitting at once, and the alien hypothesis was set aside.
The source was a neutron star: the core of a dead massive star crushed by its own weight to the size of a city, spinning fast and sweeping radio waves around like a lighthouse.
Nature could not keep time this exactly
A pulse repeating every 1.34 seconds, found in several directions of the sky
The 1974 Nobel went to her supervisor and not to her. In 2018 she gave the entire three-million-dollar purse of another major prize to fund students underrepresented in physics