Bell Burnell brought the results to Hewish.

"He said, 'That settles it, it's manmade, it's artificial radio interference,'" she recounted to the newspaper. But she knew it couldn't be interference: The radio waves were coming from something moving at the same speed as the stars — meaning the source of the pulses had to be in space.

The dense objects responsible for the squiggles are now known as pulsars – rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit radiation. Their observation is considered one of the one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the 20th century.

The discovery of pulsars was so important that it won a 1974 Nobel Prize – for Hewish.

Fifty years after Bell Burnell noticed that blip in the red ink, her observation has earned her a very big award: a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, which comes with a check for $3 million.

Bell Burnell is donating her prize winnings to the U.K.'s Institute of Physics, where they will fund graduate scholarships for people from under-represented groups to study physics.

"I don't want or need the money myself and it seemed to me that this was perhaps the best use I could put to it," she told the BBC, adding that she wants to use the money to counter the "unconscious bias" that she says happens in physics research jobs.

"One of the things women bring to a research project, or indeed any project, is they come from a different place, they've got a different background. Science has been named, developed, interpreted by white males for decades and women view the conventional wisdom from a slightly different angle — and that sometimes means they can clearly point to flaws in the logic, gaps in the argument, they can give a different perspective of what science is." - Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell