Antony Hewish
1924–2021, Fowey, Cornwall, England, UK, Cambridge, England, UK
British radio astronomer who led the group that discovered pulsars using scintillation of radio sources, sharing the 1974 Nobel Prize.
Hewish designed the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, a vast field of dipoles at Cambridge sensitive to rapid fluctuations of compact radio sources. In 1967 his graduate student Jocelyn Bell Burnell noticed an anomalous periodic signal in the data — pulses every 1.337 seconds — which the team showed came from a new class of objects soon identified as rotating neutron stars: pulsars.
Nobel-winning work
Hewish shared the 1974 Nobel Prize 'for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars'. His scintillation survey was built to detect angularly small radio sources twinkling in the solar wind; it was this sensitivity to fast variability that let it catch the precisely periodic pulses of PSR B1919+21.
Pulsars turned out to be rotating neutron stars — the first direct evidence that such objects exist. They became laboratories of extreme physics: the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar later measured gravitational-wave energy loss, and pulsar timing now tests general relativity and searches for nanohertz gravitational waves.
Workplaces: University of Cambridge
United Kingdom