World-renowned astrophysicist Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell will be visiting the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus Wednesday, February 26 to receive the Illinois Center for Advanced Studies of the Universe (ICASU) Lectureship Award. She will deliver a talk starting at 4 p.m. in the newly renamed Rosalyn Sussman Yalow Auditorium, 141 Loomis Laboratory of Physics in Urbana.
Dr. Bell Burnell was the first to discover radio pulsars—neutron stars that emit pulses of radio waves—in 1967 as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge. She detected the radio pulsar using the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, a radio antenna that she helped construct.
Neutron stars are among the most fascinating predictions of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Although the radius of a neutron star is roughly the size of Urbana-Champaign, its mass is comparable to that of the Sun. Such intense densities tremendously curve space and time, producing some of the most extreme gravitational environments in the universe.