Astronomers
The people who changed how we see the cosmos.
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8- Astronomer
Adam Riess
Adam Riess carried out much of the analysis that revealed cosmic acceleration for the High-z Supernova Search Team in 1998. He has since led precise measurements of the universe's expansion rate that hint at gaps in our cosmological model.
- Astronomer
Al-Battani
Al-Battani was among the most influential astronomers of the medieval Islamic world, observing from Raqqa in present-day Syria.
- Astronomer
Al-Sufi
Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, known in Latin as Azophi, revised Ptolemy's star catalogue against his own observations in his Book of Fixed Stars.
- Astronomer
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein reshaped our understanding of space, time, and gravity. His 1905 theory of special relativity and 1915 theory of general relativity form the foundation of modern cosmology, predicting the expansion of the Universe, black…
- Astronomer
Andrea Ghez
Andrea Ghez used the Keck telescopes and adaptive optics to follow stars orbiting the centre of the Milky Way with extraordinary precision.
- Astronomer
Annie Jump Cannon
An American astronomer who developed the stellar spectral classification system still in use today.
- Astronomer
Arno Penzias
Arno Penzias, with Robert Wilson at Bell Labs, detected a faint, uniform microwave hiss coming from every direction in the sky.
- Astronomer
Aryabhata
Aryabhata was the first of the great mathematician-astronomers of classical India.
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5- Astronomer
Carl Sagan
An American astronomer and planetary scientist celebrated for his research and his work communicating science to the public.
- Astronomer
Caroline Herschel
A German-British astronomer who discovered several comets and was among the first women paid for scientific work.
- Astronomer
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin discovered what stars are made of. Her 1925 doctoral thesis applied new atomic physics to stellar spectra and concluded that the Sun and stars are composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium — a result so…
- Astronomer
Charles Messier
Charles Messier was a dedicated French comet-hunter who grew tired of mistaking fuzzy, unmoving objects for comets. To avoid the confusion he listed them — galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters — in a catalogue of about 110 entries.
- Astronomer
Christiaan Huygens
Christiaan Huygens was a Dutch polymath who built superb telescopes of his own design.
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3- Astronomer
Edmond Halley
Edmond Halley was an English astronomer who computed the orbit of the comet that now bears his name and predicted its return.
- Astronomer
Edward Charles Pickering
Edward Charles Pickering directed the Harvard College Observatory from 1877 to 1919 and built the program of stellar spectroscopy and photography that produced the Henry Draper Catalogue.
- Astronomer
Edwin Hubble
Edwin Hubble was an American astronomer whose observations established that the universe is expanding and that galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way.
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3- Astronomer
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer and physicist who pioneered telescopic astronomy, discovering the four largest moons of Jupiter.
- Astronomer
Georges Lemaître
Georges Lemaître was a Belgian priest and physicist who, in 1927, derived an expanding universe from general relativity and estimated its rate of expansion — two years before Hubble's observations.
- Astronomer
Giovanni Cassini
Giovanni Domenico Cassini was the founding director of the Paris Observatory. He discovered four of Saturn's moons and the dark gap in its rings now called the Cassini Division, and his measurement of the parallax of Mars helped fix the…
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3- Astronomer
Henrietta Swan Leavitt
An American astronomer whose discovery of the Cepheid period–luminosity relation gave astronomers a way to measure cosmic distances.
- Astronomer
Henry Draper
Henry Draper was an American physician and pioneer of astrophotography. In 1872 he made the first photograph showing the spectral lines of a star, Vega, and in 1880 he captured the first photograph of the Orion Nebula.
- Astronomer
Hipparchus
An ancient Greek astronomer credited with compiling an early star catalogue and discovering the precession of the equinoxes.
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5- Astronomer
Jane Luu
Jane Luu, with David Jewitt, spent five years searching for objects beyond Neptune and in 1992 found the first one, (15760) Albion.
- Astronomer
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars as a graduate student at Cambridge in 1967, spotting an impossibly regular radio signal her team nicknamed 'LGM-1'.
- Astronomer
Johann Galle
Johann Galle was the astronomer at the Berlin Observatory who, on 23 September 1846, pointed his telescope where Urbain Le Verrier's calculations predicted and found Neptune almost at once.
- Astronomer
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer who formulated the three laws of planetary motion.
- Astronomer
John Herschel
John Herschel, son of William, extended the family's surveys to the southern skies from the Cape of Good Hope. His General Catalogue of nebulae and clusters became the backbone of the later New General Catalogue (NGC).
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2- Astronomer
Maarten Schmidt
Maarten Schmidt cracked the mystery of quasars. In 1963 he realised that the strange spectrum of the radio source 3C 273 was ordinary hydrogen shifted far to the red, placing the object billions of light-years away — and meaning it shone…
- Astronomer
Michel Mayor
Michel Mayor, with his student Didier Queloz, discovered 51 Pegasi b in 1995 — the first planet found orbiting a normal star like the Sun. The unexpected 'hot Jupiter' opened the entire field of exoplanet science.
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4- Astronomer
Nancy Grace Roman
An American astronomer and NASA's first chief of astronomy, often called the 'Mother of Hubble' for her role in space-based astronomy.
- Astronomer
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi built the great observatory at Maragha, one of the most advanced research institutions of its age.
- Astronomer
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and the director of New York's Hayden Planetarium, and the most prominent science communicator of his generation.
- Astronomer
Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance astronomer who formulated the heliocentric model placing the Sun at the center of the universe.
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2- Astronomer
Reinhard Genzel
Reinhard Genzel led one of two teams that, over decades, tracked the orbits of stars whipping around the centre of the Milky Way.
- Astronomer
Robert Wilson
Robert Wilson, with Arno Penzias, discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 using a sensitive horn antenna at Bell Labs.
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3- Astronomer
Saul Perlmutter
Saul Perlmutter led the Supernova Cosmology Project, one of two teams using distant Type Ia supernovae as standard candles to measure the history of cosmic expansion.
- Astronomer
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking united general relativity and quantum mechanics at the edge of black holes, predicting in 1974 that they slowly radiate and shrink — Hawking radiation.
- Astronomer
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian-American astrophysicist known for the Chandrasekhar limit on white dwarf mass, for which he shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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2- Astronomer
Ulugh Beg
Ulugh Beg was a Timurid ruler and astronomer who built a monumental observatory at Samarkand with an enormous meridian arc.
- Astronomer
Urbain Le Verrier
Urbain Le Verrier predicted the planet Neptune using mathematics alone. From small irregularities in the orbit of Uranus he calculated where an unseen planet must lie, and on the very night his prediction reached Berlin in 1846 the planet…