While black holes are now a cornerstone of modern astronomy, few people know that the first observational evidence of a black hole was discovered by a woman whose contributions were initially overlooked. In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, then a PhD student at Cambridge University, detected regular radio pulses from space that couldn't be explained by known astronomical objects.
These mysterious signals, which Bell Burnell meticulously tracked and analyzed, were initially nicknamed "Little Green Men" because they were so regular they seemed potentially artificial. They turned out to be pulsars—rapidly rotating neutron stars—which provided critical evidence for the existence of black holes.
Despite this groundbreaking discovery, when the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for this work, Bell Burnell wascontroversially excluded, with the honor going to her male supervisor instead. Today, her perseverance and scientific rigor are finally recognized as pivotal contributions to astrophysics, and she's become an inspiration for women in science around the world.