1918-1984

English Radio Astronomer

Martin Ryle did not establish radio astronomy, but he made it practical by overcoming difficulties astronomers encountered when trying to study stars by analyzing their radio emissions. Due to the long wavelengths of radio waves, it was thought that a radio telescope would have to be impossibly large and too expensive to build. It was Ryle's achievement to develop a giant "phantom" telescope, actually a series of measurements made from smaller telescopes, linked by computer. He shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in physics with Antony Hewish (1924- ).

Born on September 27, 1918, in Brighton, England, Ryle was the son of physician John A. Ryle and Miriam Scully Ryle. His was an exceedingly distinguished family: not only was his father the director of the Institute of Social Medicine at Oxford University, as well as Oxford's first professor of social medicine, his uncle Gilbert Ryle...