In this episode of the Broadcast Monologues, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell narrates her inadvertent discovery of pulsars: dense, rotating neutron stars—a death state of collapsed stars—that emit swinging beams of light, like astrophysical lighthouses. Born into a family keen on education, Jocelyn battled for her right as a young student in Ireland to learn science beside her male peers. Having developed a particular enthusiasm for astronomy, she attended the University of Glasgow, where her presence as a female student in physics lectures was an anomaly. Nevertheless, she excelled. Driven by curiosity and badgered by imposter syndrome, she strove on. Admitted as a PhD student to Cambridge University, she joined a prestigious group headed by Professor Anthony Hewish—today a Nobel laureate. There, in 1967, while operating a radio telescope built to detect quasars, she encountered an inexplicable signal in her data, the defiant, metronomic impression of a neutron star. The discovery also rendered the implausible—black holes—suddenly plausible. Animator Micah Ganske provides an ethereal visual context for Bell Burnell’s personal story.
Producer and sound designer: Matt Frassica
This project is supported by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology, bridging the two cultures of science and the arts.
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