Antony Hewish

Antony Hewish (1924-2021) was a British radio astronomer at the University of Cambridge who shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in the discovery of pulsars, the first Nobel Prize awarded for astronomical research. Hewish designed and built a large radio telescope array to study the scintillation of radio sources, and in 1967 his graduate student Jocelyn Bell Burnell used it to detect an unusual, rapidly repeating radio signal. Hewish and his colleagues identified the source as a rotating neutron star, or pulsar, a discovery that opened a new field of observational astrophysics and provided the first direct evidence for the existence of neutron stars predicted decades earlier. Hewish had earlier received the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969 for his contributions to radio astronomy techniques, including work on radio-wave scintillation used to study the interplanetary medium and solar wind.