This International Women's Day,we witness the amazing contributions of Women in Science, the unsung heroes whose name's are not so well known, but their discoveries have radically transformed our understanding of the Cosmos.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell



•She is an Irish Astrophysicist. •She is the co-discoverer of the first Radio Pulsars. •This discovery is regarded as "One of the most significant achievements in the 20th century".

Pulsars When a massive star explodes, it collapses under its own Gravity to form a Black Hole.But if the star is not massive enough, the outer region expands and as the star explodes, its remnants coalesce together to form a neutron star. It's called a neutron star because it is made of neutrons(The protons and electrons inside the core are smashed together to form neutrons). An artists visualisation of Planets orbitingB1257+12

A rotating neutron star is called a Pulsar.These pulsar emits beams of light in Radio,Gamma,Visible or X-rays. These days are detected on Earth and thus Pulsars are discovered.

The chart on which Jocelyn Bell Burnell recognised the existence of PSR B1919+21, the first Pulsar to be detected.





Fun Fact:Since they were detecting Radio signals from the Pulsar, the first Pulsar was nicknamed LGM1 which actually stands for 'Little Green Men', hinting at the presence of an intelligent life.





Astronomer. •She was a German

•Her most significant contributions to astronomy were the discoveries of several comets, including the periodic comet 35P/Herschel-Rigollet,named after her and Roger Rigollet.

Messier 110, a nebula discovered by Caroline Herschel





•She is the first women to be awarded a Gold Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society, London.

•She, along with Mary Somerville were the first women to become honorary members of The Royal Astronomical Society , founded by John Herschel.





Mary Somerville

•She was a Science writer, mathematician and a polymath.

•Her book 'On the Connexions of the Physical Sciences' is regarded as one of the most revolutionary works in Science.

Fun Fact: Mary Somerville is the first scientist.

The word 'scientist' was coined by William Whewell as he was reviewing her work. Before that, scientists we're called 'philosophers' and 'man of science'.

A crater on the Moon named after Mary Somerville.





Emmy Noether

•Emmy Noether was a German mathematician who made many important contributions in theoretical physics.

•She found the relation between symmetries and Conservation law .

•This is one of the most beautiful and elegant concept in all of Physics.

Turns out , there are different kinds of symmetries and each symmetry implies conservation of a quantity, and that quantity is called Generator.In physics, we say something is symmetric if the energy of a system before the transformation is same as the energy after the transformation. For example momentum is conserved. If I move this ball by a distance Lambda, the energy before and after the transformation is same, thus it is symmetric,and hence the Mirror symmetry

Benjamin Franklin chose to call electrons negatively charged, but I can arbitrarily say electrons are positive and protons are negative, and nothing about the laws of Physics will change. What I call an electron or a proton is arbitrary, if 2 electrons repel each other, 2 protons will also repel each other. The implication of this is The Universe cannot be charged, the net charge of the Universe is 0

Rosalind Franklin

hemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite.

•Rosalind Elsie Franklin was an English Cand X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of

Photo 51, showing an X-Ray diffraction of DNA.





•The image was tagged as 'photo 51' because it was the 51st photograph that Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling, a graduate student working under her, had taken.

•The photo was acquired through 100 hours of X-ray exposure from a machine Franklin herself had refined.





Historically, women in STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) have been mistreated for a millennia. Society cannot progress if half of our population is held back from achieving their full potential. Science is about solving problems, and these amazing mysteries in Science could be solved twice as fast if there's twice the people working on it.Every year there are improvements for Women in STEM, more and more women are entering Science and technology ,but the discrimination still exists, and it is the responsibility of every person who cares about science to help fight this prejudice.





“Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.” - Mae Jamison, first African American woman astronaut in space







Article by : Shanawaz Shaikh.

(F.Y.BSc)



