James Stanley Hey (3 May 1909 – 27 February 2000) was an English

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

and radio

astronomer An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. Astronomers observe astronomical objects, such as stars, planets, natural satellite, moons, comets and galaxy, galax ...

. With the targeted application of

radar Radar is a system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), direction ( azimuth and elevation angles), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It is a radiodetermination method used to detect and track ...

technology for astronomical research, he laid the basis for the development of

radio astronomy Radio astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that studies Astronomical object, celestial objects using radio waves. It started in 1933, when Karl Jansky at Bell Telephone Laboratories reported radiation coming from the Milky Way. Subsequent observat ...

. While working in

Richmond Park Richmond Park, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, is the largest of Royal Parks of London, London's Royal Parks and is of national and international importance for wildlife conservation. It was created by Charles I of England, Cha ...

during the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

, Hey discovered that the Sun radiates

radio waves Radio waves (formerly called Hertzian waves) are a type of electromagnetic radiation with the lowest frequencies and the longest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum, typically with frequencies below 300 gigahertz (GHz) and wavelengths ...

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 Nelson is a town and civil parishes in England, civil parish in the Borough of Pendle in Lancashire, England, it had a population of 29,135 in the 2011 Census. Nelson is north of Burnley and south-west of Colne. Nelson developed as a mill town ...

, the third son of a cotton manufacturer, which was the main industry in Lancashire. Hey studied physics at the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The University of Manchester is c ...

, graduating in 1930, and obtained his master's degree in

X-ray An X-ray (also known in many languages as Röntgen radiation) is a form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength shorter than those of ultraviolet rays and longer than those of gamma rays. Roughly, X-rays have a wavelength ran ...

crystallography Crystallography is the branch of science devoted to the study of molecular and crystalline structure and properties. The word ''crystallography'' is derived from the Ancient Greek word (; "clear ice, rock-crystal"), and (; "to write"). In J ...

the next year as a student of

Lawrence Bragg Sir William Lawrence Bragg (31 March 1890 – 1 July 1971) was an Australian-born British physicist who shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics with his father William Henry Bragg "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by m ...

Career

After graduating, Hey became a teacher, and taught physics at

Burnley Grammar School Burnley Grammar School was latterly, a state-funded selective boys' grammar school, situated in Byron Street in Burnley, Lancashire. However, during its long history, it moved between a number of sites in the town. History In 1552, on the orde ...

for some years. In 1940 Hey joined the

Air Defence Research and Development Establishment The Air Defence Research and Development Establishment (ADRDE) was a British civilian research organization run by the War Office that primarily studied the development of radar for British Army use. It was formed in 1941 from the merger of the A ...

's (ADRDE) Operational Research Group, later the Army Operational Research Group (AORG) after a six-week course at the Army Radio School. Hey was based at Petersham, Surrey, and later at Ibstock Place,

Roehampton Roehampton is an area in southwest London, sharing its SW15 postcode with neighbouring Putney and Kingston Vale, and takes up a far western strip, running north to south, in the London Borough of Wandsworth. It contains a number of large counc ...

, Surrey. His main research site was nearby in

. From February 1942 Hey's task was to work on radar anti-jamming methods; for a year German jamming of Allied radar had been a problem and the escape of three German warships through the English Channel, aided by enemy

jamming from the French coast, had highlighted the problem. On 27 and 28 February 1942 Hey had reports from sites across Britain of severe noise jamming of anti-aircraft radars in the 4–8 m range. Realising that the direction of maximum interference seemed to follow the Sun, he checked with the

Royal Observatory, Greenwich The Royal Observatory, Greenwich (ROG; known as the Old Royal Observatory from 1957 to 1998, when the working Royal Greenwich Observatory, RGO, temporarily moved south from Greenwich to Herstmonceux) is an observatory situated on a hill in Gre ...

and found that a very active sunspot was traversing the solar disc. He concluded that a sunspot region, which was believed to emit streams of energetic ions and electrons in magnetic fields of around 100 G (gauss), could emit metre-wave radiation. This was the first discovery of a specific astronomical radio source. Later in 1942, G.C. Southworth in the USA also linked the Sun with radio noise, this time in the centimetre-wave region. Later, in 1944–1945, Hey used radar to track the paths of

V-2 rocket The V2 (), with the technical name ''Aggregat (rocket family), Aggregat-4'' (A4), was the world's first long-range missile guidance, guided ballistic missile. The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the S ...

s approaching London at about 100 miles high, aiming to be able to predict their point of impact. He noticed spasmodic transient radar echoes at heights of about 60 miles, arriving at a rate of five to 10 per hour. When the V-2 attacks ceased, the echoes did not; Hey concluded that

meteor A meteor, known colloquially as a shooting star, is a glowing streak of a small body (usually meteoroid) going through Earth's atmosphere, after being heated to incandescence by collisions with air molecules in the upper atmosphere, creating a ...

trails were responsible and that radar could be used to track meteor streams, and could of course do so by day as well as by night. When he tried to increase the sensitivity of his radar in order to track V-2s from a greater distance, he rediscovered the cosmic radio noise that

Karl Jansky Karl Guthe Jansky (October 22, 1905 – February 14, 1950) was an American physicist and radio engineer who in April 1933 first announced his discovery of radio waves emanating from the Milky Way in the constellation Sagittarius. He is consider ...

and

Grote Reber Grote Reber (December 22, 1911 – December 20, 2002) was an American pioneer of radio astronomy, which combined his interests in amateur radio and amateur astronomy. He was instrumental in investigating and extending Karl Jansky's pioneering wo ...

had found in the 1930s. Hey's results of 1942 and 1944 could not be published until after the war. From 1945 to 1947, Hey used AORG's radars in Richmond Park to research his wartime radio astronomical discoveries further. The Richmond Park installation thus effectively became the first radio observatory in Britain. 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. In 1946 the Sun became active again, and the group confirmed sunspots and solar flares as the source of the emissions. In 1945 and 1946 they confirmed radar echoes from meteors, and derived methods to derive meteor shower radiants from the echoes, so discovering the first daytime meteor shower. In 1945 and 1946 they mapped the intensity of cosmic radio noise across the sky. In February 1946 they discovered a strong source in Cygnus which scintillated rapidly. Hey realised that the scintillation meant that the source must be compact, and suggested that it was a 'radio star'. It was later shown to be

Cygnus A Cygnus A ( 3C 405) is a radio galaxy, one of the strongest radio sources in the sky. Discovery and Identification A concentrated radio source in Cygnus was discovered by Grote Reber in 1939. In 1946 Stanley Hey and his colleague James Phillip ...

, a radio galaxy. This was, after Hey's discovery of the radio Sun, the first discovery of a specific astronomical radio source. During this period visitors to Hey at Richmond Park included

Bernard Lovell Sir Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell ( ; 31 August 19136 August 2012) was an English physicist and radio astronomer. He was the first director of Jodrell Bank Observatory, from 1945 to 1980. Early life and education Lovell was born at Oldland Co ...

, whom Hey helped to establish his radio observatory at the University of Manchester, and Jack Ratcliffe, under whom

Martin Ryle Sir Martin Ryle (27 September 1918 – 14 October 1984) was an English radio astronomer who developed revolutionary radio telescope systems (see e.g. aperture synthesis) and used them for accurate location and imaging of weak radio sourc ...

and

Antony Hewish Antony Hewish (11 May 1924 – 13 September 2021) was a British radio astronomer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 (together with fellow radio-astronomer Martin Ryle) for his role in the discovery of pulsars. He was also awarded the ...

established radio astronomy at Cambridge. Hey's observatory in Richmond Park was closed in 1947. Hey became Head of the AORG in 1949. From 1952 he returned to ADRDE, which later became part of the

Royal Radar Establishment The Royal Radar Establishment was a research centre in Malvern, Worcestershire in the United Kingdom. It was formed in 1953 as the Radar Research Establishment by the merger of the Air Ministry's Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE ...

Malvern, Worcestershire Malvern (, locally also: ) is a spa town and Civil parishes in England, civil parish in Worcestershire, England. It lies at the foot of the Malvern Hills, a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The centre of Malvern, Great Malvern, is ...

, where he also continued his radio astronomical observations. At his observatory at

Defford Defford is a small village in the county of Worcestershire, England, located between the towns of Pershore and Upton-upon-Severn. It was once part of the Royal forest of Horewell. The woodlands were mostly removed around the time of the Civil ...

, Worcestershire, he built a variable-spacing

radio interferometer Interferometry is a technique which uses the ''interference'' of superimposed waves to extract information. Interferometry typically uses electromagnetic waves and is an important investigative technique in the fields of astronomy, fiber opti ...

, 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 The Wesleyan Church is a Methodist Christian denomination aligned with the holiness movement. Wesleyan Church may also refer to: * Wesleyan Methodist Church of Australia, the Australian branch of the Wesleyan Church Denominations * Allegheny We ...

family, Hey became an agnostic in his teenage years, and remained so for the rest of his life. He met his wife, Edna Heywood, when they were both students at Manchester University. They married in 1934. The couple moved to

Eastbourne Eastbourne () is a town and seaside resort in East Sussex, on the south coast of England, east of Brighton and south of London. It is also a non-metropolitan district, local government district with Borough status in the United Kingdom, bor ...

in 1969, following Stanley Hey's retirement. Edna died in September 1998, 12 years after having a severe stroke.

Honours, awards and fellowships

* 1945 – MBE for operational research on Army radar * 1947 – Fellow of the

Royal Astronomical Society The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) is a learned society and charitable organisation, charity that encourages and promotes the study of astronomy, planetary science, solar-system science, geophysics and closely related branches of science. Its ...

* 1950 – DSc, University of Manchester, on the strength of Hey's 1940s radio astronomy research * 1959 –

Eddington Medal The Eddington Medal is awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society for investigations of outstanding merit in theoretical astrophysics. It is named after Sir Arthur Eddington. First awarded in 1953, the frequency of the prize has varied over the ye ...

of the Royal Astronomical Society * 1975 - Honorary Doctor of the

University of Birmingham The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a Public university, public research university in Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingham (founded in 1825 as ...

* 1978 – Fellow of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

* 1977 – Honorary Doctor of the

University of Kent The University of Kent (formerly the University of Kent at Canterbury, abbreviated as UKC) is a Collegiate university, collegiate public university, public research university based in Kent, United Kingdom. The university was granted its roya ...

Legacy

Asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet—an object larger than a meteoroid that is neither a planet nor an identified comet—that orbits within the Solar System#Inner Solar System, inner Solar System or is co-orbital with Jupiter (Trojan asteroids). As ...

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 ''Proceedings of the Royal Society'' is the main research journal of the Royal Society. The journal began in 1831 and was split into two series in 1905: * Series A: for papers in physical sciences and mathematics. * Series B: for papers in life s ...

'', 192, 425–445

Popular science books

* Hey, J. S. (1971). ''The Radio Universe''. Oxford:

Pergamon Press Pergamon Press was an Oxford-based publishing house, founded by Paul Rosbaud and Robert Maxwell, that published scientific and medical books and journals. Originally called Butterworth-Springer, it is now an imprint of Elsevier. History The c ...

, 256pp. * Hey, J. S. (1973). ''Evolution of Radio Astronomy''. New York: Science History Publications.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hey, James Stanley 1909 births 2000 deaths 20th-century English astronomers 20th-century British physicists Alumni of the University of Manchester English physicists English science writers Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society Fellows of the Royal Society History of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames Members of the Order of the British Empire People associated with the University of Birmingham People associated with the University of Kent People from Nelson, Lancashire Radar pioneers Radio astronomers Richmond Park War Office personnel in World War II