HEWISH, ANTONY

born May 11, 1924, Fowey, Cornwall, Eng. British astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 for his discovery of pulsars (cosmic objects that emit extremely regular pulses of radio waves). Hewish was educated at the University of Cambridge and in 1946 joined the radio astronomy group there led by Sir Martin Ryle. While directing a research project at the Mullard Radioastronomy Observatory at Cambridge in 1967, Hewish recognized the significance of an observation made by a graduate assistant, Jocelyn Bell. He determined that the regularly patterned radio signals, or pulses, that Bell had detected were not caused by earthly interference or, as some speculated, by intelligent life forms trying to communicate with distant planets but rather were energy emissions from certain stars. For this work in identifying pulsars as a new class of stars, he was awarded jointly with Ryle the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974, the first time the prize had been given for observational astronomy. Hewish was professor of radio astronomy at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, from 1971 to 1989.