Space - Tullamore Astronomical Society

Great Irish Women Astronomers
By Girvan McKay, Tullamore AS
Having read and heard a bit recently about the
contribution made to astronomy by a number of
remarkable Irish women, I think I can understand
why some women become militant feminists. Women
astronomers and scientists have had a raw deal – and not
only in Ireland. We know a great deal about people like
William Parsons, the Third Earl of Rosse, but how many
of us can mention one female astronomer? Those of us
who were at Cosmos some years ago, when Dr. Susan
McKenna Lawler was a guest, can name one anyway,
but she is by no means alone in her field.
Take the Irishwoman Agnes Mary Clerke, for
example. She lived from 1842 to 1907 and has been
described as ‘the chief astronomical writer of the
English-speaking world. She is commemorated in a
crater on the moon which bears her name. Mary Ward
(1827-1869), a first cousin of William Parsons is
remembered as an early pioneer of the microscope rather
than being involved in astronomy, but since both involve
optics, the two activities are not unconnected. Mary
Ward was the author of “Microscope Teachings” which
helped to popularise the instrument.
Recently I heard a very interesting radio
interview with another outstanding Irish astronomer,
Professor (Susan) Jocelyn Bell Burnell, born 1943 in
Lurgan, Co. Armagh and educated at the Universities of
Glasgow and Cambridge. The entry under her name in
the Encyclopaedia of Ireland reads as follows: “While a
postgraduate student at the Mullard Radio Laboratory,
Cambridge, she collaborated with her supervisor
Anthony Hewish, in constructing a radio telescope to
investigate the scintillation of distant radio sources”.
It seems, however, from what she said during
the interview that most of the work of construction was
done by herself. She says that it was then that she
learned to use tools, such as pliers, a skill that girls
weren’t taught at her school. In 1967 she discovered the
first known pulsar – a rapidly spinning neutron star of
about twice the Sun’s mass which had collapsed to a
sphere of only a few kilometres in diameter. She told the
interviewer that such a collapsed star is so dense that a
piece of its material the size of a sugar cube would be as
massive as our Earth. She managed the British support
team of the international submillimetre-wave telescope
in Hawaii. In 2001 she was appointed dean of science at
the University of Bath. She has received nine honorary
doctorates besides many other awards.
Without any show of resentment, Dr. Bell
Burnell mentioned how credit for the discovery of
pulsars was given to the male astronomers she worked
with. In the 1960s women scientists were not taken
seriously. When the news broke of the pulsar discovery
the team at the Radio Laboratory was swamped by
reporters and photographers. All the scientific questions
were fired at the men while the newspaper people were
interested only in asking Dr. Bell Burnell personal
questions, such as, did she have any boy friends and who
was her present one? She was asked by the
photographers to undo the top button of her dress for the
photographers. Yet this was the person who made one
of the most important astronomical discoveries of our
time.
It was striking how mildly Dr. Bell Burnell
reacted to the way she was treated. During the radio
broadcast she was asked what astronomers’ attitude was
to religion. She replied that many were religious while
others were not, and mentioned that she herself was of a
Quaker background. She said that Quakers had a history
of being involved in science because of their openness to
freedom of thought and research. We can compare this
with the way great scientists like Galileo were treated by
the Church and the distrust of science by some United
States fundamentalists today.
I hope we in TAS and Réalta readers will have a
chance to learn more about pulsars and other distant
bodies in space. It is a fascinating subject.
Girvan McKay, TAS.
Editors Note: Its funny you should submit this Girvan. No sooner had I received your piece than I received the
following article next page by Deirdre Kelleghan from the Irish Astronomical Society, about her recent trip to Trinity
College Dublin to see Dr. Burnell talk about Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944). Read On…
Réalta – Volume 7, Issue 2 – November/December 2005 – Tullamore Astronomical Society 13