How Richard Hills opened a new window into the birth of stars
In short: British astronomer Richard Hills transformed millimetre-wavelength astronomy from an experimental niche into a cornerstone of modern astrophysics. By pioneering instrumentation for the spectral region between radio waves and infrared, he enabled scientists to peer through cosmic dust and observe the hidden, violent processes of star formation across the universe.
Born in 1945, Richard Edwin Hills dedicated his career to mastering the challenging spectral region of one millimetre. After completing his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and conducting research at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, he returned to the University of Cambridge. There, he became a central figure in developing the specialized telescopes required to detect signals in this relatively unexplored band, which is essential for studying the cold, dense gas clouds where stars are born.
Hills's influence was cemented through his leadership on two major international projects. As project scientist for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, he oversaw its design and construction, later using it to study distant, redshifted quasars. His expertise led to his appointment as project scientist for the Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile in 2007. This massive interferometer required complex phase-coherent aperture synthesis to monitor atmospheric absorption, a technical feat that proved vital for the project's success.
Beyond his technical contributions, Hills served as a professor of radio astronomy at Cambridge and a fellow of St Edmund's College. His work was widely recognized, earning him the Royal Astronomical Society's Jackson-Gwilt Medal in 1989 and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014. By the time of his death in 2022, Hills had helped shift millimetre astronomy from a fringe pursuit into a central pillar of observational astrophysics, forever changing how we map the evolution of galaxies.
His legacy remains tied to the precision of his instruments. The successful deployment of ALMA, which began scheduled observations in 2011, demonstrated the power of his approach. By managing the continuous monitoring of atmospheric conditions above each antenna, Hills ensured that the array could achieve its full angular resolution, providing humanity with an unprecedented view of the universe's most elusive star-forming regions.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Richard Edwin Hills
- Also: www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk — Richard Hills recognised in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
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