Antony Hewish

Antony Hewish was a British radio astronomer at the University of Cambridge who designed and built a large radio telescope array specifically intended to study the rapid twinkling, or scintillation, of distant radio sources caused by the solar wind. In 1967, using this instrument, Hewish's research group, in which graduate student Jocelyn Bell Burnell first noticed and correctly identified an unusual, extremely regular pulsing radio signal in the data, discovered pulsars, a previously unknown class of astronomical object now understood to be rapidly rotating, highly magnetized neutron stars that sweep a beam of radio waves across space like a lighthouse with each rotation. The discovery, announced in 1968, was one of the most significant astronomical findings of the twentieth century, opening an entirely new window onto extremely dense, compact stellar remnants that had previously existed only as a theoretical prediction. Hewish was awarded a half share of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with fellow Cambridge radio astronomer Martin Ryle, for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars, part of the first Nobel Prize ever given for work in astronomy.