50 Years Ago Jocelyn Bell Discovered Pulsars
space.com
space.com
See also:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/mar/08/jocelyn-bell...
"demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it – after all, I am in good company, am I not!" [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell#Nobel_Pri...
She did not discover pulsars. She was a lab assistant who, as she was writing the numbers down in the lab book, first noticed that there were pulsar patterns in them.
Being the first to lay eyes on something is not typically what we mean, in science, by discovering it. Or else the guy cleaning the ship's deck in the morning should be rewarded for discovering America.
The prize was awarded to the head of the team as it was a project of his design and his organization. To have split 1/3 of the prize with whatever grad student happened to be keeping the books seems ridiculous.
Edit: Also comparing a Doctoral student who "helped build the telescope" to a cleaner is rather unfair. Francis Crick was a PhD student when they worked out the structure of DNA.
If they would change the rules to make exceptions for shared discoveries, it won't dilute the reputation boost for the scientists in question in the slightest, and if they give the money to the surviving winners that problem is solved too.
My understanding is that she was not given credit in her lifetime so she would not have been awarded it anyway. Unless, someone had explained her contribution in those 4 years.
“Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely recognised posthumously.”
And there are more: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130519-wome...
"first noticed that there were pulsar patterns in them."
is way different than
"guy cleaning the ship's deck in the morning should be rewarded for discovering America."
in the first case, other people might not (and had not) noticed.
Equating "holy shit! these are multi-solar-mass nucleons rotating at a significant fraction of lightspeed" to the common experience of "land ho!" is absurd.
We award "discoveries" to those people who own and arrange circumstances that permit "discovery" in the narrow sense.
Which grad student had the logbook was potluck. The existence of the project, the running of the project, etc. had nothing to do with the grad. students it employed.
In the narrow sense then, the Nobel Prize is not about giving the "first human" a gold star. It is about recognizing the drivers of progress in some area. The former is accidental, the latter deliberate. In some situations, esp. in early science, these were the same people (ie. the person who put all the work into creating the project was also the first-recogniser of results).
Since the victorian era, increasingly we have to distinguish between whose ambition a project was, and whose effort saw its realization -- and which individual happen to be the first to press-play on the peak-detection software.
I mean, sure, but that doesn't mean any grad student would have looked at the logs and found the pulsar patterns. Bell did. If she hadn't said anything the data may have been overlooked for years. What matter is her position on the project?
Though from what I've gathered in recent discussions about Nobel prizes, it is rather common that the project leader is awarded the prize, regardless if his actions directly lead to the "discovery" or not.
We know the guy by the way, one Rodrigo de Triana, natural of Lepe. NASA's DSCO satellite was originally named Triana after him.
> On his famous 1492 voyage, Columbus had promised a reward of gold to whoever saw land first. A sailor named Rodrigo de Triana was the first to see land on October 12, 1492: a small island in the present-day Bahamas Columbus named San Salvador. Poor Rodrigo never got the reward however: Columbus kept it for himself, telling everyone he had seen a hazy sort of light the night before. He had not spoken up because the light was indistinct. Rodrigo may have gotten hosed, but there is a nice statue of him sighting land in a park in Seville.
Yes it is. Take Pluto, for example. Astronomers predicted Pluto mathematically from other planets' orbits decades before it was 'discovered':
> Subsequent observations of Neptune in the late 19th century led astronomers to speculate that Uranus's orbit was being disturbed by another planet besides Neptune. (Edit: changed quote to correct one.)
> Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 [...]
> On February 18, 1930, after nearly a year of searching, Tombaugh discovered a possible moving object on photographic plates taken on January 23 and 29.
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto)
Edit: He also has an asteroid and a Lunar crater named after him.
Very difficult to imagine something of n solar masses rotating that quickly, or how long they will continue to rotate at an appreciable percentage of their current speed.
I wish someone would put together an updated version of this with higher quality audio.
(And yeah, she wasn't a mere grad student - after her initial discovery and after it was dismissed by everyone around her, to borrow a phrase, she persisted.)
http://www.unn.edu.ng/publications/files/images/EYA,%20INNOC...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOkjLtCCozM
About as far as away as one can imagine, a similar thing appears to happen with very low accelerations with some of our satellites. My search-fo failed on that so far.
Bonus scale crazyness for all the battery 2.0 articles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp4JrbpBvWc
1. The night's sky never actually looks like that. Is it simply that the exposure was long so that the brightness of each object is enhanced? How long would the exposure have to be?
2. What is that pinkish nebula-like band/arc that the photo is centered around?
But yes, even an optimally dark sky isn't that colorful to a human eye. That's because human low-light vision, provided by rod cells, is almost entirely monochromatic. A camera sensor doesn't have such limitations. You do need an exposure time of several seconds at least, but first and foremost you need to get away from light pollution. No amount of exposure time is going to help you inside a large city; the sky just comes up ugly orange-gray.
To a totally dark-adapted human eye in an optimally dark location the night sky is a sight to behold.
Typically what you'll do is take images of the same object with a telescope at a variety of different wavelengths. The basic pattern is to use 3 images, and then use each one to represent a different colour from red, green and blue. Then layering one on top of another you can create an image that looks like the bright and colourful ones you typically see of nebula/pulsars etc.
This way you get lots of detail, since different parts of the celestial bodies are only visible at certain wavelengths. So a single wavelength image would be over saturated with certain effects.
So even though these are technically "false" colour images of space. There is a scientific reason for doing it.
Not saying that the photo in the article is false, I think it's just had a long exposure time.
Anyway, hope this helps understanding of astrophotography in general.
The band in the photo is the milky way.
I agree. Additionally, I assume most people here on HN live on a place that is heavily light-polluted, see https://www.lightpollutionmap.info .
If OP happen to pass by a place with low light pollution, I encourage him/her to stay and watch the sky for a while (30 minutes ?) so that the eyes can adapt to darkness. It's really a neat experience.
One of the other replies to your comments talks about false colour photography, however this one, I think is probably true colour with long exposure.
The problem you have is that for very dim objects the colour-sensing 'cone' cells in your retina pretty bad. In low light conditions you're much more reliant on the rod cells, which are monochrome only (and more abundant in the periphery - if you are ever looking at a dim object, try looking at it from the corner of your eye).
That photo is most certainly a composite of some sort. It was also taken in the Southern Hemisphere (Australia).
It's possible, but you have to have your shit together.