Sir Francis Graham-Smith obituary

Pioneering radio astronomer whose work locating celestial objects led to a greater understanding of the universe

Sir Francis Graham-Smith, who has died aged 102, was the last of the generation that created modern radio astronomy, the branch of astronomy that studies the universe with radio waves, in the 1940s and 50s. His PhD thesis, on the first Cambridge radio survey, carried out between 1948 and 1950, with reasonably accurate positions for the brightest sources, paved the way to demonstrating that the majority of celestial radio sources are distant galaxies with massive black holes in their nuclei.

Following the discovery of pulsars, pulsating radio sources associated with rapidly rotating neutron stars, in 1967 by Antony Hewish, Jocelyn Bell and others, Graham-Smith used the Jodrell Bank Mark I telescope to study pulsars in detail. He and Andrew Lyne wrote the definitive book on the subject, Pulsar Astronomy (1990).