Hewish, Antony (1924-2021), a British astronomer and astrophysicist, won the 1974 Nobel Prize for physics, together with British astrophysicist Sir Martin Ryle, for the discovery of pulsars. A pulsar is an astronomical source of powerful radio waves emitted in short, intense bursts or pulses at precise intervals.
Hewish’s earliest research focused on radio waves and other radiation received from outside the earth’s atmosphere. He used the scintillation (twinkling) of radio stars to measure the height and dimensions of plasma clouds, collections of charged particles, in the ionosphere (a layer of the upper atmosphere). In the mid-1960’s, he used a similar technique to make measurements of the solar wind (the stream of charged particles extending out from the sun).
Between 1965 and 1967, Hewish constructed a large radio telescope. A graduate assistant, Jocelyn Bell, detected regular radio signals from one scintillating source (see Bell Burnell, Jocelyn ). Hewish proved that these signals were caused neither by earthly interference nor by intelligent life forms elsewhere in the universe, but by what became known as pulsars.
Hewish was born on May 11, 1924, in Fowey, England. He studied and taught at the University of Cambridge, where he became head of the university’s radio astronomy group. His and Ryle’s Nobel Prize of 1974 was the first Nobel Prize for physics to be awarded for astronomical observations. Hewish died on Sept. 13, 2021.
