Astrophysicist previously snubbed for Nobel earns $3 million prize for her 1967 discovery

Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell made a groundbreaking discovery in 1967. On Thursday, she was finally recognized for the revelation with a Special Breakthrough Prize — 44 years after her male supervisor won a Nobel Prize for the same research.

The Guardian reports that Bell Burnell was two years into her Ph.D. studies at Cambridge University when she spotted unusual pulsing patterns in radio wave data gathered from a radio telescope she helped build. The Irish-born researcher carefully studied the pulsars, now understood to be spinning, magnetized neutron stars, for more than a month before bringing the discovery to her Ph.D. supervisor, Antony Hewish. Their determination that the signals were not man-made was revolutionary.

Hewish was named a winner of the Nobel Prize in 1974, but Bell Burnell was not.

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Despite the snub, Bell Burnell went on to become the first female president of the Institute of Physics and is now a professor at the University of Oxford. This week, the Breakthrough prize recognized her "lifetime of inspiring scientific leadership," and lauded the importance of her 1967 discovery. "It led to several powerful tests of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and to a new understanding of the origin of the heavy elements in the universe," the prize statement read. The Breakthrough prize has previously been awarded to Stephen Hawking and comes with $3 million in prize money.

Bell Burnell said she wasn't surprised when her supervisor won the Nobel without her, but she's glad to have the chance to donate her prize money to a scholarship fund for people underrepresented in physics. Read more at The Guardian.