Jacqueline Hewitt

Hewitt discovered the first example of an Einstein Ring, in which a distant astronomical object is imaged into a ring by the gravitational field of a closely aligned galaxy.  After several years as a leader in lensing studies, she proposed that the first stars to form in the early universe would burn holes in the primitive hydrogen gas, observable by sufficiently large low-frequency radio telescope. To tackle the scale of this project, she then proposed that the phenomenon could be studied by measuring the spectral density as a function of redshift by a realistic telescope.  The first generation of such a telescope was completed in the Australian outback in 2013.  Based on lessons learned, a larger next generation radio array is now under construction in South Africa and will be used to continue these studies of the first stars with more sensitivity.