The Sky at Night – Queen of Pulsars (TV BBC Four)
The Sky at Night is a monthly documentary television programme on astronomy produced by the BBC.
The show had the same permanent presenter, Patrick Moore, from its first broadcast on 24 April 1957 until 7 January 2013. The latter date was a posthumous broadcast, which followed Moore’s death on 9 December 2012. This made it the longest-running programme with the same presenter in television history. Many early episodes are missing, either because the tapes were wiped, thrown out, or because the episode was broadcast live and never recorded in the first place. Beginning with the 3 February 2013 edition, the show was co-presented by Lucie Green and Chris Lintott. Since December 2013 Maggie Aderin-Pocock has been a presenter. The programme’s opening and closing theme music is “At the Castle Gate”, from the incidental music to Pelléas et Mélisande, written in 1905 by Jean Sibelius, performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.
This episode:
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a discoverer and an explorer of the distant cosmos, and she has walked among the stars. She discovered the first pulsar in 1967 – a discovery so important in our understanding of the universe that it would earn a Nobel Prize. But Jocelyn didn’t receive it.
All her life a deep thinker, a dedicated Quaker and a fierce advocate for equal opportunity in physics, Jocelyn has carved an astonishing career doing and communicating science, changing the face of astronomy as a result.
Jocelyn was determined to succeed in an environment not made for her, and her story resonates with young and old, student and professor – and anyone who has ever felt like they may not really belong.
In this film, we hear Jocelyn’s story direct from the subject herself and learn how, from the small town of Lurgan in Northern Ireland, she rose to worldwide recognition. It is a tale of determination and triumph against the prejudice and misogyny of the time.
Alongside the history are the enigmas themselves: pulsars. The conditions surrounding these objects make them the most extreme laboratories in the cosmos, uniting the most complex and cutting-edge physics under one roof. Matter crushed down into its densest form, encased within extreme magnetic fields – and they are even telling us the secrets of the very make-up of our universe. Some flavours of these objects are so dramatic that just one outburst can briefly outshine an entire galaxy.
With Dr Vanessa Graber from Royal Holloway, University of London, Maggie delves into the concealed interiors of pulsars and the exotic states of matter that form them. With superfluids of neutrons hosting quantum tornados and searing hundred-million-degree plasma, pulsars are not the once-predictable characters we thought them.
Chris, meanwhile, is at the University of Oxford with Dr Kaustubh Rajwade, studying the oddballs of the pulsar family and how to decode their messages. As a blast of radiation travels from a pulsar to our detectors, the history of its journey through the universe is imprinted on the signal. We learn how to use this to see the unseen – the parts of the cosmos that are almost impossible for us to observe – revealing its detailed structure for the first time.
In conversation, Jocelyn joins PhD student Aida Seye to discuss shared passions and challenges in chasing cosmic dreams. Aida is a recipient of the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund, instigated by Jocelyn to support PhD students from underrepresented groups. Aida is studying the structure of the Milky Way, with the aim of bringing us closer to solving the mystery of dark matter.
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