Last month, on the clear April 5th evening at Carnewas, Kernow Astronomers held one of our “Sun and Stars” where anyone can come to view the setting Sun and Moon and planets through telescopes. A perfect discovery evening for young and old! Looking north in the distance was the Trevose Head Lighthouse blasting out its bright white beam every 7.5 seconds.
Every April some of the Kernow Astronomers members join other astronomers at Sparsholt College in Winchester at the annual British Astronomical Association weekend. Here we enjoy presentations from leading astronomers and scientists at the forefront of research and exploration of our amazing Universe.
This year, the keynote presentation is given by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She was born in 1943 in Lurgan, Northern Ireland where her father was an architect who helped design the Armagh Planetarium. During young Jocelyn’s visits there she was encouraged to pursue a career in astronomy. In 1965 she gained a Physics degree from University of Glasgow and then a PhD from Cambridge in 1969. But it was during her research as a postgraduate student at Cambridge that a lucky discovery made her famous in the astrophysics world. She worked with others to construct the Interplanetary Scintillation Array; basically a series of poles and wires in a field.
Image Credit: Michael Kramer http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~mkramer/Animations.html
On 28 November 1967, Jocelyn was laboriously checking the long paper chart records gained from this radio receiver array that tracked the stars across the sky. She suddenly spotted an odd regular repeating signal within the red wiggly lines. She established that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of one pulse every 1.3 seconds. Could this be a sign of aliens communicating with their version of Morse Code? So it was jokingly nicknamed “Little Green Man 1” or LGM-1.
The source was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star and named as a Pulsar (pulsating star) that emits pulsating radio bursts and Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to discover one. Neutron stars are what is left behind after a star explodes as a supernova and are mind-bendingly dense and rotate at fantastically high speeds. A Pulsar is a highly magnetized rotating neutron star that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation out of its magnetic poles across space similar to the way Trevose Head lighthouse pointed its light in my direction at Carnewas.
Jocelyn’s Cambridge supervisors Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1974 for their work in radio astronomy and pulsars and many have argued that Jocelyn should have been a co-recipient of the prize. However, in 2018, she received the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and donated the $3 million prize money to a fund for women, ethnic minorities, and refugee students to become research physicists, demonstrating her commitment to supporting underrepresented groups. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell – a real lighthouse shining the way forward.
Glynn Bennallick