Word: hewish
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...summer of 1967, Jocelyn Bell, a graduate student at Cambridge University's Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, discovered that a radio telescope she was monitoring had picked up some curious signals from space. She called the beat-like pulses to the attention of Astronomer Antony Hewish, the senior scientist. Hewish's team at first suspected them to be signals from an extraterrestrial civilization. But further inquiry proved that pulsars, as the signal sources were named, were actually long-sought neutron stars, small and incredibly dense collapsed stars. So significant was the discovery to the understanding of stellar evolution that...
Little Green Men. The contributions of Ryle and Hewish, the first radio astronomers to win the Nobel Prize, are equally significant. Unlike astronomers who view the visible light from celestial objects through optical telescopes, they observe the invisible, longer wave lengths of energy given off by stars, galaxies and other heavenly bodies. To detect these so-called radio frequencies, they use radio telescopes-giant antennas that focus the incoming waves much as optical telescopes focus light waves...
...Hewish was cited for his discovery of pulsars, distant objects that give off regularly spaced bursts of radio waves. When he and his colleagues at Cambridge, using a radio telescope, first detected these pulses coming from a point in the sky, they suspected that they had picked up signals from intelligent beings in space-and promptly named the source LGM (for Little Green...
Radio Beacon. Further observations by Hewish and other radio astronomers soon put this tantalizing speculation to rest but eventually confirmed that a pulsar is a neutron star. Space, in fact, seems to be full of neutron stars. Since Hewish and his assistant, Jocelyn Bell, found the first one, about 100 more have been identified by astronomers. A neutron star is a bizarre object. It is formed when a giant star exhausts its nuclear fuel and collapses inward on itself, crushing much of its matter into a ball of neutrons some ten miles in diameter-but so dense that a thimbleful...
Astrophysicists had postulated the existence of neutron stars in the 1930s but had despaired of ever discovering them; they were too small, scientists felt, for their light to be detected from earth. Hewish's observations confirmed that these strange bodies, conceived in the mind of man, really exist in the far reaches of space...