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 pulsar s as a new class of stars, he shared a 1974 Nobel Prize with Martin Ryle .