[17] Her father was an architect who helped design the Armagh Planetarium,[18] and during her visits there, the staff encouraged her to pursue a career in astronomy.

[23]She next joined the University of Glasgow, where in 1965 she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Philosophy (physics), with honours, and then New Hall, Cambridge, where she gained a PhD in 1969.

[c] Bell Burnell was the subject of the first part of the BBC Four three-part series Beautiful Minds, directed by Jacqui Farnham.

[24] On 28 November 1967, while a postgraduate student at Cambridge, Bell Burnell detected a "bit of scruff" on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars.

Temporarily dubbed "Little Green Man 1" (LGM-1) the source (now known as PSR B1919+21) was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star.

[34] In 2018, Bell Burnell visited Parkes, NSW, to deliver the keynote John Bolton lecture at the Central West Astronomical Society (CWAS) AstroFest event.

[13] Issued in July 2022, Ulster Bank's new science-themed polymer £50 banknote prominently features Bell Burnell alongside other women, including those working in NI's life sciences industry.

She helped build the Interplanetary Scintillation Array over two years[8] and initially noticed the anomaly, sometimes reviewing as much as 96 feet (29 m) of paper data per night.

Bell later said that she had to be persistent in reporting the anomaly in the face of scepticism from Hewish, who initially insisted it was due to interference and man-made.

Feryal Özel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, characterized Bell Burnell's contributions as follows: She helped build the array she used to make the observation.

[13]In later years, she opined that "the fact that I was a graduate student and a woman, together, demoted my standing in terms of receiving a Nobel prize.

She delivered a Swarthmore Lecture under the title Broken for Life,[85] at Yearly Meeting in Aberdeen on 1 August 1989, and was the plenary speaker at the US Friends General Conference Gathering in 2000.

In a 2021 online lecture at the University of Bedfordshire, Bell Burnell reflected on her first experience returning to the observatory wearing an engagement ring.

Though she was proud of her ring and wanted to share the good news with her colleagues, she instead received criticism as, at the time, it was shameful for women to work as it appeared that their partners were incapable of providing for the family.

She worked part-time for many years while raising their son, Gavin Burnell, who is a member of the condensed matter physics group at the University of Leeds.