| Citation | Distinguished for his contributions to Radio Astronomy. He developed the theory of diffraction by an irregular phase screen and by applying it to his observations of the scintillation of radio sources first established the scale, electron content and motions of irregularities in the upper ionosphere.
He subsequently extended this work by his remarkable discovery of similar scintillations due to small-scale irregularities in the interplanetary plasma; in a series of elegant observations he has provided important information on the outflow of matter from the sun and on the angular structure of some of the sources themselves - including a remarkable component in the Crab nebula of only 0.1"arc.
Hewish was largely responsible both for the theory of "aerial synthesis" and for the statistical study of overlapping images which allowed radio source observations to be extended to provide the most convincing evidence for the evolution of the universe. |