Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, at 24, as a post-graduate student at the University of Cambridge, discovered the first four pulsars. In July 1967, she detected some noise on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with stars. She found that the signal was pulsing with great regularity and at a rate of a pulse per second. It was temporarily dubbed Little Green Man-1 (LGM-1). She found 3 more pulsars to confirm her suspicions. Despite having been the first to observe and precisely analyze pulsars, her advisor Antony Hewish and astronomer Martin Ryle won the Nobel Prize for the discovery. In 2014, she was made president on the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the first woman to hold that office. She is also the only woman to ever win the Herschel Medal, awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society, for “investigations of outstanding merit in observational astrophysics”.