1924-

English astronomer who was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in physics for co-discovering pulsars. Pulsars were among the first of the "astronomical oddities" that, once discovered, greatly revised scientific understanding of the cosmos. In 1967 Hewish's graduate student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, noted very regular radio signals from a part of the sky. First thought that they may be signals from another civilization, Hewish eventually understood these electromagnetic energy pulses to be very fast-spinning remnants of supernova explosions.