Hewish, Antony

Hewish, Antony

(born May 11, 1924, Fowey, Cornwall, Eng.) British astrophysicist. In 1967 Hewish determined that the regularly patterned radio signals (pulses) that Jocelyn Bell Burnell had detected were not caused by earthly interference or, as some speculated, by intelligent life-forms trying to communicate with distant planets but were energy emissions from certain stars. For this work in identifying pulsars as a new class of stars, he shared a 1974 Nobel Prize with Martin Ryle.

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Hewish, Antony 

Born May 11, 1924, in Fowey, Cornwall. British astronomer. Fellow of the Royal Society of London (1968).

Hewish was educated at Cambridge University and became a professor there in 1971. He investigated the scintillation of radio sources that subtend a small angle and, independently of the Soviet astronomer V. V. Vitkevich, suggested that the outer layers of the solar corona could be investigated by studying the radio emissions of the Crab Nebula as they move through the corona. He headed the group of radio astronomers that discovered pulsars in 1967.

Hewish received a Nobel Prize in 1974.