Probably the
world’s greatest female astronomer, Irishwoman Professor Jocelyn Bell-Burnell will give Astronomy
Ireland’s Christmas Public Lecture, entitled “Women in Astronomy”, at Trinity
College Dublin, on Monday 11 December at 8:00pm. The talk will be given in the
Physics Building, near the Westland Row and Lincoln Place
entrances.
Astronomy is a science where many women made an early and valuable contribution. In the early 1800s, Caroline Herschel, sister of William Herschel who discovered Uranus, was herself one of the world’s leading comet discoverers, bagging 25 of them in as many years. Later that century, Annie Jump Cannon began to revolutionised the system by which we classify stars. Her system, which was adopted internationally in 1911, is essentially unchanged today.
The foremost
woman astronomer of recent years is
Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, the discoverer of
pulsars (1967). She was controversially passed over for the 1974 Nobel Prize,
which was awarded instead to her PhD supervisor. Prof. Bell-Burnell is unusual in that she has
at one time or another been at the forefront of almost every branch of
astronomy, unlike most astronomers who specialise early, and stick with their
chosen field. Most recently, she officiated at the meeting of the International
Astronomical Union that removed Pluto’s planetary status (see www.astronomy.ie/lecture0612.html )
In 1967 Prof.
Bell-Burnell was a PhD student, working with an unusual radio telescope
consisting of a clothesline array of wires covering 1.5 hectares of fields near
Cambridge. With this she discovered a strange pulsing radio signal from outer
space, that for a while seemed to be originate from an intelligent source -
"We did not really believe that we had picked up
signals from another civilisation, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds
and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an
interesting problem - if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the
universe how does one announce the results responsibly? Who does one tell
first?"
The signal turned out to come from a rapidly
spinning condensed star, what we now call a ‘pulsar’; but back then these
bizarre objects were unknown to science. For the discovery, Bell-Burnell was
passed over for the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics, as she had not completed her
PhD at the time of her discovery. It was awarded instead to her PhD supervisor,
Antony Hewish, even though he acknowledged her as the true
discoverer.
In the
Astronomy Ireland Christmas lecture entitled “Women in Astronomy” Professor
Bell-Burnell pays tribute to the largely unacknowledged contribution of women to
our understanding of the universe.
Speaker
Professor Jocelyn
Bell-Burnell
Title
“Women in Astronomy”
Venue
Physics Building, Trinity College
Dublin.
Date
Monday 11 December, 8:00pm
Admission €5
(€3 for members and concessions)
For general info (including a map to locate the venue) go to our website – www.astronomy.ie
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"Black Holes and White Rabbits" By Professor John Brown