James Stanley Hey

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James Stanley Hey , called Stanley Hey, (born May 3, 1909 in Nelson , Lancashire , † February 27, 2000 probably in Eastbourne ) was a British pioneer of radio astronomy .

Life

Hey studied physics at the University of Manchester with a master's degree in X-ray crystallography in 1931. Afterwards he was a teacher and in the Second World War he worked in radar research, especially radar countermeasures on the German side. He also discovered radio emissions from sunspots (which George Clark Southword independently discovered in the US in 1942 ), and while tracking V2 rockets with radar, he discovered radar reflections of ionized gases in the orbits of meteorites. Both were only published after the war. In 1949 he became director of the Army Operational Research Group (AORG), of which he had been a member since 1942. After the war he conducted research from 1952 at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern , Worcestershire , from 1962 until his retirement in 1966 as head of research.

He and colleagues discovered that radio emissions from the direction of Cygnus A fluctuated strongly in the Milky Way, and they inferred a group of discrete objects. This was the first extragalactic radio source found when the fluctuations observed at the time also turned out to be secondary to the ionosphere.

In Malvern he drove the development of radio astronomy from the m range to the cm range, starting with a converted German Würzburg device (10 cm wavelength). In the early 1960s, he and RL Adgie and H. Gent achieved resolutions of 1 arc second in radio astronomy with an interferometer of two telescopes at a distance of 1 km.

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and received the Eddington Medal in 1959 . In 1977 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Kent . The asteroid (22473) Stanleyhey was named after him.

Fonts

  • The Radio Universe, Pergamon Press 1971, online
  • Evolution of Radio Astronomy, London: Elek Science 1973

literature

  • Antony Hewish , Biographical Memoirs Fellows Royal Society, Volume 48, 2002
  • Nigel Henbest, Heather Cooper, Astronomy and Geophysics, 41, 2000, p. 38
  • Thomas Hockey u. a. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers , Springer Verlag 2005 (article by T. Sullivan Woodruff)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hey Solar Radiations in the 4-6 Meter Radio Wave-Length Band , Nature, Volume 157, 1946, pp. 47-48
  2. ^ Hey, GS Stewart Derivation of Meteor Stream Radiants by Radio Reflexion Methods , Nature, Volume 158, 1946, p. 481
  3. ^ Hey, Stewart Radar Observation of Meteors , Proceedings of the Physical Society, Volume 59, 1947, p. 858
  4. ^ Hey, SJ Parson, JW Phillips Fluctutations in cosmic radiation at radio-frequencies , Nature, Volume 158, 1946, p. 234
personal data
SURNAME Hey James Stanley
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British radio astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH May 3, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Nelson (Lancashire)
DATE OF DEATH February 27, 2000
Place of death Eastbourne