Professor Dame (Susan) Jocelyn Bell Burnell born in Belfast 15 July 1943 is an Astrophysicist.

As a postgraduate student at Cambridge University she worked with Antony Hewish (her thesis supervisor) and others to build a 4-acre radio telescope in order to study quasars.

In July 1967, Bell noticed a bit of “scruff” on her chart-recorder papers which tracked across the sky. Closer examination revealed that the signal was pulsing with great regularity – a pulse approximately every second.

Initially dubbed “Little Green Men 1” (LGM1) the source was eventually identified as a rapidly rotating neutron star.

Bell had discovered and correctly analysed the first radio pulsar.

It was Bell’s persistence of reporting the anomaly in the face of scepticism from Hewish, that ultimately identified the phenomena and resulted in the paper announcing the discovery which had Hewish’s name first; Bell’s second.

Despite this, it was Hewish in conjunction with Martin Ryle (for his work on aperture-synthesis technique), who received the Nobel Prize in Physics – excluding Bell completely.

This omission of Bell as a co-recipient caused outrage amongst many prominent astronomers including Sir Fred Hoyle, whose harsh criticism of the Nobel Prize committee was, it has been conjectured, the reason for his own exclusion of 1983 Prize.