Jocelyn Bell Burnell Quotes

Solar bursts typically last from half a minute to a couple of minutes and often sound like a rapid hissing noise followed by a gradual decrease back to the original audio level.

Sunspots are hubs of intense magnetic activity and they trigger solar flares that launch charged particles, X-rays, ultraviolet radiation and radio waves at the Earth.

We were on the dark side of the Earth when we started to see outside the window this soft pink glow, which is a lot of little angry ions out there going very fast. We were hitting them very fast.

Mars does not have an atmosphere and does not have a magnetic field today, so the planet doesn't have the protection from radiation that our atmosphere and magnetic fields provide us on Earth.

Of course, Sol is a big ball of hot gas, but one that - thanks to its endlessly boiling innards - shakes and vibrates. By studying patterns on the Sun's surface, astronomers can learn much about Sol's internal construction.

What a feeling! You and I are the only people in the world that really know that the Van Allen Belt is real.

We live inside the atmosphere of an active star.

Saturn itself is a giant planet, and there's much to be gained by investigating its meteorology and studying its magnetic field.

The surface of Mars is bathed in ultraviolet light, bathed in radiation. Mars's magnetic field is essentially gone, so the surface of Mars is essentially sterilized.

The Sun's magnetic field reverses every 11 years. There have been a quarter of a million reversals since our predecessor, Homo Habilis, emerged, and they haven't killed us yet.

You walk out in the street, we don't know if we're going to get across. It's a test.

I'd love to tell you I had some deep revelation on my way down, that I came to terms with my own mortality, laughed in the face of death, et cetera. The truth? My only thought was: Aaaaggghhhhh!

It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared.

Rabbits live close to death and when death comes closer than usual, thinking about survival leaves little room for anything else.

It was eerie. I saw myself in that machine. I never thought my work would come to this. Upon seeing a distorted image of his face, reflected on the inside cylindrical surface of the bore while inside an MRI (magnetic-resonance-imaging) machine-a device made possible by his early physical researches on nuclear magnetic resonance (1938).

Gasping for breath, the body still battling for life.

I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the ordinary things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep - great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth’s magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery.

What, then, is light according to the electromagnetic theory? It consists of alternate and opposite rapidly recurring transverse magnetic disturbances, accompanied with electric displacements, the direction of the electric displacement being at the right angles to the magnetic disturbance, and both at right angles to the direction of the ray.

you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.

I am iron resisting the most enormous magnet there is.

I know climate change is a hoax – of course – but places that have never seen this type of winter weather got hit by it. More than a half a million southerners have been left in the dark --- and then the storm hit.

An event horizon, or the point of no return, is only a byproduct of the bending of space. However, electricity and magnetism, by themselves, have no event horizon. It gets complicated, however, if a black hole has charge, and then this new solution does have an event horizon.

The attacks on our police and the terrorism of our cities threaten our very way of life.

Americans are desperately, here on the West Coast, buying up and hoarding iodine pills... Isn't it great that in a land that is divided between conservative morons and liberal pussies, somehow we have managed to find a way to pull together and behave like moronic pussies?