James Stanley Hey

James Stanley Hey (3 May 1909 – 27 February 2000) was an English physicist and radio astronomer. With the targeted application of radar technology for astronomical research, he laid the basis for the development of radio astronomy. While working in Richmond Park during the Second World War, Hey discovered that the Sun radiates radio waves and localised for the first time an extragalactic radio source in the constellation Cygnus.

Early life and education

He was born in 1909 in Nelson, Lancashire, the third son of a cotton manufacturer, which was the main industry in Lancashire. Hey studied physics at the University of Manchester, graduating in 1930, and obtained his master's degree in X-ray crystallography the next year as a student of Lawrence Bragg. Hey's main colleagues in this work were John Parsons (1918–1992), an electrical and mechanical engineer; Gordon Stewart (1919–2003), an electrical engineer; and James Phillips (1914–2003), a mathematician, who like Hey had been a schoolmaster before the war. From 1952 he returned to ADRDE, which later became part of the Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern, Worcestershire, where he also continued his radio astronomical observations. At his observatory at Defford, Worcestershire, he built a variable-spacing radio interferometer, with which he briefly parallelled Martin Ryle's research at Cambridge. From 1966 until his retirement in 1969 Hey was head of the research department.

Personal life Brought up in a church-going Wesleyan Methodist family, Hey became an agnostic in his teenage years, and remained so for the rest of his life. They married in 1934. 1975 – Honorary Doctor of the University of Birmingham 1978 – Fellow of the Royal Society 1977 – Honorary Doctor of the University of Kent

Legacy Asteroid 22473 Stanleyhey, discovered in 1997, is named in his honour.

Works

Hey, J. S.; Parsons, S. J.; Phillips, J. W. (1948). "An investigation of galactic radiation in the radio spectrum", Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 192, 425–445

Popular science books

Hey, J. S. (1971). The Radio Universe. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 256pp. Hey, J. S. (1973). Evolution of Radio Astronomy. New York: Science History Publications.