Antony Hewish shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars.
Pulsars are rapidly rotating, strongly magnetized neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation. As a beam sweeps across Earth, radio telescopes can detect a regular series of pulses. The first pulsar was found in 1967 in observations made with a radio telescope designed under Hewish’s direction at the University of Cambridge.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, then a graduate student, noticed the unusual repeating signal and helped identify it. She was not included among the 1974 laureates, a frequently discussed historical omission. The other half of the prize went to Martin Ryle for his work in aperture synthesis, a radio-astronomy technique. Pulsars later became precise tools for testing theories of gravity and studying stellar remnants.