Betty Louise Turtle
Betty Louise Turtle was an Australian astronomer and physicist. In 1971, with her colleague Paul Murdin, she identified the powerful X-ray source Cygnus X-1 as the first clear candidate for a black hole.
Career
Turtle attended the University of Adelaide and continued studies as one of the first students at the graduate school of Mount Stromlo Observatory, outside Canberra where she was strongly influenced by the American astronomers Bart Bok and Priscilla Fairfield Bok. She gained a Ph.D. in 1967 on the subject of southern planetary nebulae while working with the Swedish astronomer Bengt Westerlund. She moved to the University of Wisconsin before taking up a position at the Royal Greenwich Observatory at Herstmonceux Castle, firstly as a Scientific Officer then Principal Scientific Officer. She worked with Richard [van der Riet Woolley|Richard Woolley], the Astronomer Royal, and then Paul Murdin, with whom she had been elected to the Royal Astronomical Society at the same time in 1963.Turtle and Murdin were careful about the language of the paper they submitted to the journal Nature describing their discovery, titled Cygnus X-1 — a Spectroscopic Binary with a Heavy Companion? with the final words, "...it might be a black hole." Their boss, Woolley, was more conservative as an astronomer and their cautiousness was mirrored by colleagues, though other astronomers agreed with them.
Her work in Sussex led directly to a posting at the South African Astronomical Observatory, where Woolley became director from 1972, and then the new 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope in a commissioning role before becoming staff astronomer there.
In 1978, she found her final employment at the University of [New South Wales] in the physics faculty; in November that year she married Tony Turtle. While at the university, she was the driving force for the Automated Patrol Telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory, introduced a fourth-year course for astronomers, served on or chaired many committees and promoted astronomy very actively through the International Astronomical Union and the Astronomical Society of Australia.
She died after a long illness at her home in Paddington, Sydney.