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Inspirational woman Scientist visiting Astronomers May 5th 2014

On 11th June HASI will be hosting the eminent astrophysicist Dame Prof Jocelyn Bell Burnell who is credited as being the person who discovered Pulsars. This is a great honour for Horowhenua Astronomical Society Inc and will go down in history as one of our greatest events. Dame Jocelyn is known to be an excellent, down to earth speaker and renowned woman of science. She is also scheduled as Keynote speaker at the RASNZ 50th Annual Conference hosted by Whakatane Astronomical Society from Friday 6th June to Sunday 8th June http://rasnz.org.nz/Conference/

In 1999 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to Astronomy and promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2007. In February 2013 she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4. In February 2014 she was made President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the first woman to hold that office.

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS, FRAS

Dame Jocelyn is a Northern Irish astrophysicist who as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars while studying with Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Martin Ryle, while Bell Burnell was excluded, despite having observed the pulsars. She was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, President of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010. Bell Burnell graduated from the University of Glasgow with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Philosophy (physics) in 1965 and obtained a Ph.D. degree from University of Cambridge in 1969. At Cambridge, she worked with Hewish and others to construct a radio telescope for using interplanetary scintillation to study quasars, which had recently been discovered. In July 1967, she detected a bit of "scruff" on her chartrecorder papers which tracked across the sky with the stars. Ms. Bell found that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse per second. Temporarily dubbed "Little Green Man 1" (LGM-1) the source (now known as PSR B1919+21) was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star. Only about 1,000 pulsars are known to exist, though there may be hundreds of millions of old neutron stars in the galaxy. The staggering pressures that exist at the core of neutron stars may be like those that existed at the time of the big bang, but these states cannot be simulated on Earth.

The Speaker: Dame Prof Jocelyn Bell Burnell Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University Title of talk: We are made of star stuff Te Manawa Museum Main Building, Palmerston North Wednesday 11th June 2014 6.30pm Start Admission: Gold Coin

Further background:-

Talking about her discovery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKtnaTxLARc

Women in science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp7amRdr30Y

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Inspirational woman Scientist visiting Astronomers