Formal talk with Jocelyn Bell-Burnell – Interstellar Chemistry
Jocelyn’s talk will be on ‘Interstellar Chemistry’.
“Water and alcohol (lots of the first, less of the second) carbon monoxide, and other small molecules are now regularly observed in space. Particularly common in dusty areas of the galaxy, screened from starlight, they are giving us a lot of information about the physical conditions there. I will discuss how these molecules are detected, how we think they form and where the elements came from.”
Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell DBE FRS FRSE FRAS FInstP is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. She was credited with “one of the most significant scientific achievements of the 20th century”. The discovery was recognised by the award of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics but, despite being the first person to discover the pulsars, she was not one of the recipients of the prize.
Bell Burnell served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, as president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010, and as interim president of the Institute following the death of her successor, Marshall Stoneham, in early 2011.
In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Following the announcement of the award, she decided to give the whole of the £2.3 million prize money to help female, minority, and refugee students seeking to become physics researchers, the funds to be administered by the Institute of Physics. The resulting bursary scheme is to be known as the “Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund”.