Bell Burnell House

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, née Bell (1943- ), British radio astronomer, co-discoverer of the pulsar.

Susan Jocelyn Bell was born in Belfast, on July 15, 1943, and educated at the University of Glasgow and the University of Cambridge, where she gained a doctorate in 1968. In 1967, while she was a research student of Antony Hewish, she noticed an unusual regularity in the records of signals picked up by the Cambridge radio telescope from astronomical sources. This led Hewish to postulate the existence of pulsating radio stars, subsequently known as pulsars. They are believed to be extremely dense, fast-spinning neutron stars. Bell Burnell was awarded the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1989, and was professor of physics at the Open University between 1991 and 2001. She was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003. In 1999 Bell Burnell was made a CBE; in 2007 she was created a dame. 

House Team

Head of House: Miss J Young