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Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, CBE, FRS, FRSE, FRAS, FInstP - Doctor of Science - Astronomer; Visiting Professor, Oxford University; Professorial Fellow, Mansfield College, Oxford, speaker and broadcaster

Oration by Dr S J Gurman

Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell is an astrophysicist who has worked in all areas of the electromagnetic spectrum, observing new sources from radio frequencies to high energy gamma rays. She has been an outstanding leader of research both at the Open University, where for ten years from 1991 she was Professor of Physics, and then as Dean of Science at the University of Bath, a position she held until her retirement in 2004. She is an enthusiastic and committed communicator of science to the public and a champion of women in science.

Susan Jocelyn Bell was born in Belfast, simply because that was where the maternity hospital was: she spent her ch8ildhood in Lurgan, County Armagh. Her parents encouraged her to read extensively and she was especially drawn to books on astronomy. At the age of thirteen she went to the Mount School in York, a Quaker girls’ boarding school. There she was taught by a Physics master who impressed on her the great strength and breadth of Physics: “You don’t have to learn lots and lots … of facts; you just learn a few key things and … then you can apply and develop and build from these”.

Thus inspired, she went on to read Physics at the University of Glasgow before moving to Cambridge to work in Radio Astronomy for her doctorate. At Cambridge she was part of a team building a new radio telescope under the direction of Antony Hewish. This telescope was not in the familiar steerable dish shape but was an array of fixed antennas, wires strung between posts, which covered an area of some five acres. It took two years to build, with Jocelyn Bell erecting posts with the aid of a heavy sledge hammer – not, I hope, in the depths of a Fenland winter.

Using this new telescope, Jocelyn Bell observed a very strange radio source, a source which pulsed regularly with an extremely well-defined frequency, about once per second. This source was known, somewhat tongue in cheek, as LGM, standing for Little Green Men, since it was thought to be possibly artificial. However, Jocelyn Bell soon showed that the source was not in the Solar System and hence distant and very strong. This strength, and the precision of the period, indicated that it was a natural source. It was the first radio pulsar to be discovered and Jocelyn Bell soon found several more. The name pulsar comes from PULSating stellAR object. They are now known to be rapidly rotating neutron stars which emit a narrow beam of energy. As the star rotates (and it must be a very small object to rotate so fast) this beam sweeps across the Earth rather like the beam from a lighthouse. The observation of pulsars has been described by Iosif Shlovsky as “the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century”.

Jocelyn Bell married Martin Burnell in 1968. Family commitments meant that for the next twenty years she moved around this country from one temporary research post to another, acquiring in the process an unrivalled experience of almost all branches of astronomy. She spent five years at the University of Southampton doing gamma-ray astronomy (at the time I was a humble Physics undergraduate in the same department); eight years at the Mullard Space Science laboratory, which I believe is the other centre for X-ray instrumentation in this country; and nine years in millimetre wave and infra-red astronomy at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. She has used ground-based radio telescopes, telescopes on satellites, launched on sounding rockets or flown on high-altitude balloons. A Professor of Physics at the Open University from 1991 she established a major astrophysics group and studied neutron and binary stars. Incidentally, this appointment doubled the number of female Professors of Physics in the U.K!

Professor Bell-Burnell’s interests and activities spread well beyond the broadest spectrum of astronomy. The public understanding of science has long been a major part of her life. She believes strongly that the ethics of science is crucial: scientists must be seen to behave in an entirely open and proper manner. Her Quaker faith is important to her and she has considered it in both her published Swarthmore lecture and in a long interview broadcast by the BBC. In the latter she considers in some detail the relationship between faith and science. She also has a longstanding interest in poetry, editing “Dark Matter” an anthology of new poetry inspired by discussions between poets and space scientists. This volume was published last year and was named as one of its ten best poetry books by the Independent in April of this year. Some of you may possibly have listened to Dame Jocelyn discussing this subject at the Hay Festival some five weeks ago.

Professor Bell-Burnell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003 and was awarded the DBE in 2007. She served as President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004 and was elected President of the Institute of Physics last year. She is one of the very few people to lead both of these learned societies and is the first female President of the Institute in its 135 years of existence.

Mr Vice-Chancellor, on the recommendation of the Senate and of the Council, I present Jocelyn Bell-Burnall that you may confer on her the Honorary degree of Doctor of Science.

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