Growing up, her father was an architect who worked on the Armagh Planetarium. When she was still quite young, she discovered his astronomy books, which she enjoyed immensely. As a student at the Preparatory Department of Lurgan College, she had to fight to be allowed to take classes in science. The school's policy was changed after several parents complained. Unfortunately, when she was ready to move to secondary school she failed the eleven-plus exam, and was instead sent to study at a Quaker boarding school.
This was a good move, giving her the preparation she needed for her college studies. Still interested in astronomy, she attended the University of Glasgow, where she earned a BS in physics in 1965, and then went on to the University of Cambridge, where she studied quasars with Antony Hewish. It was here where she helped construct the radio telescope that she used to discover the first radio pulsar.
In July 1967, she was recording signals received by the radio telescope when she noticed a little bit of "scruff" in the data. They were looking for more quasars, analyzing data from scanning the sky once every four days. All the data was printed on a kind of chart-reporter -- a device with three pens that tracks input, similar to a seismograph, only in this case tracking radio waves rather than seismic waves. After seeing this "scruff" on her reports enough, she could tell it wasn't from human-made radio transmissions, and it wasn't from a quasar. But what was it?
She set up some new recordings to try to figure out its source, but it wasn't until November that she was able to get a clear chart showing a series of pulses, exactly 11/3 seconds apart. When she showed her data to Antony Hewish, he was skeptical, but agreed to visit the observatory with her to check it out. When it was clear that it wasn't something coming from the earth (not radar bouncing off the moon, satellites in orbit, or other bits of human-made interference) they started to wonder if it was some kind of transmission from an alien world, hence her readings were dubbed "Little Green Man 1" or LGM-1..
My eureka moment was in the dead of night, the early hours of the morning, on a cold, cold night, and my feet were so cold,
they were aching. But when the result poured out of the charts,
you just forget all that. You realize instantly how significant
this is—what it is you’ve really landed on—and it’s great!
they were aching. But when the result poured out of the charts,
you just forget all that. You realize instantly how significant
this is—what it is you’ve really landed on—and it’s great!
It wasn't until she was analyzing data from a completely different part of the sky and found a similar bit of "scruff" at the same frequency that she began to suspect it was something else entirely. It was unlikely that the first reading was from aliens, and even more unlikely that there was a second set of aliens transmitting at the same frequency from somewhere else in the universe.
More analysis, and more "scruff," and now there were four different sources. By now they had a term, "pulsar" -- so named because it was a rapidly rotating neutron star that emitted regular pulses -- which they used in a paper in January of 1968. When the news about LGM-1 hit the press, she and the rest of the team were inundated with interview requests from all sides. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the majority of the questions she fielded were along the lines of "How many boyfriends do you have," and whether she was "taller than or not quite as tall as Princess Margaret?" When the excitement died down, she handed off the research to other students while she wrapped up her thesis. She graduated with her PhD in 1969, got married and moved from radio astronomy to gamma-ray astronomy, glad to be able to do some "reliable and solid, undramatic science."
And she has. She worked at the University of Southampton from 1968 to 1973, the University College London from 1974 to 1982, and the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh from 1982 to 1991. In addition to her duties on campus, she also worked as a tutor, consultant, examiner, and lecturer for the Open University -- a public distance learning and research university -- from 1973 to 1987, and served as Professor of Physics from 1991 to 2001. She was a visiting professor in Princeton University and Dean of Science in the University of Bath from 2001 to 2004, and is currently Visiting Professor of Astrophysics in the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Mansfield College. In February 2018 she was appointed Chancellor of the University of Dundee.
She served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, and president of the Institute of Physics from 2008 to 2010. When asked about not being included in the Nobel Prize, she laughs it off good-naturedly, saying, "You can actually do extremely well out of not getting a Nobel prize, and I have had so many prizes, and so many honours, and so many awards, that actually, I think I've had far more fun than if I'd got a Nobel Prize - which is a bit flash in the pan: You get it, you have a fun week, and it's all over, and nobody gives you anything else after that, cos they feel they can't match it."
She's done alright. She's received a dozen or so awards, was the first woman to serve as president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1999 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and then promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2007.
For more reading:
You can read her article about the discovery of pulsars, "Little Green Men, White Dwarfs or Pulsars?"
The Herald article "Face to Face: science star who went under the radar of Nobel Prize judges"
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