swap_horiz Claudius Ptolemy Alternatives

1

Philip James Edwin Peebles

Philip James Edwin Peebles is a Canadian-American cosmologist at Princeton, awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for...

Modern Cosmology Nobel Cmb

9.8 Brilliant

2

S. Chandrasekhar

S. Chandrasekhar was an Indian American astrophysicist whose 1930 Chandrasekhar limit explained the maximum mass of stab...

Twentieth Century Black Holes Stellar Nobel

9.7 Brilliant

3

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a Northern Irish astrophysicist who discovered the first radio pulsars as a Cambridge...

Modern Radio Women Pulsars

9.7 Brilliant

4

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is the Northern Irish scientist whose 1967 pulsar discovery opened a major field in radio astr...

Modern Radio Women Pulsars

9.7 Brilliant

5

Bohdan Paczynski

Bohdan Paczynski was a Polish astronomer at Princeton University notable for his pioneering work on gravitational microl...

Polish Twentieth Century Gamma Rays Microlensing

9.6 Brilliant

6

Jan Oort

Jan Oort was a Dutch astronomer who established the Milky Way's rotation in the 1920s and proposed the distant comet res...

Dutch Twentieth Century Galactic Oort Cloud

9.4 Excellent

7

Dame Margaret Burbidge

Dame Margaret Burbidge was a British-American astrophysicist and first author of the 1957 B2FH paper explaining how star...

Twentieth Century Women Galaxies Nucleosynthesis

9.4 Excellent

8

William Herschel

William Herschel was a German-born British astronomer who discovered Uranus in 1781 and built large reflecting telescope...

Eighteenth Century Nebulae Uranus Telescopes

9.3 Excellent

9

Lyman Spitzer

Lyman Spitzer was an American astrophysicist who proposed a space telescope in 1946 and led work on plasma physics and i...

American Space Twentieth Century Interstellar

9.3 Excellent

10

Aristarchus of Samos

Aristarchus of Samos was a Greek astronomer who proposed a heliocentric cosmos in the 3rd century BCE and estimated Sun...

Solar Ancient Greek Heliocentric

8.9 Great

11

John Herschel

John Herschel was a British astronomer who surveyed southern skies from South Africa in the 1830s and cataloged nebulae...

Southern Nineteenth Century Catalogs Nebulae

8.8 Great

12

Ulugh Beg

Ulugh Beg was a Timurid ruler and astronomer who built the Samarkand observatory and compiled a major star catalog in th...

Medieval Observatory Samarkand Catalogs

8.6 Great

13

Charles Messier

Charles Messier was a French astronomer whose 18th-century catalog listed nebulae and clusters to help comet hunters avo...

Comets Catalogs Eighteenth Century Nebulae

8.4 Great

14

Eudoxus of Cnidus

Eudoxus of Cnidus was a 4th-century BCE Greek astronomer and mathematician noted for homocentric spheres modeling planet...

Ancient Greek Planetary Spheres

8.3 Great

15

Al-Sufi

Al-Sufi was a Persian astronomer whose 964 Book of Fixed Stars described constellations and gave one of the earliest rec...

Medieval Islamic Stars Catalogs

8.2 Great

16

Caroline Herschel

Caroline Herschel was a German-born British astronomer who discovered several comets and became a paid royal astronomer...

Women Comets Catalogs Eighteenth Century

8.2 Great

17

Edward Charles Pickering

Edward Charles Pickering was an American astronomer who directed Harvard College Observatory from 1877 and expanded phot...

Harvard Twentieth Century Catalogs Photometry

8.2 Great

18

Johannes Hevelius

Johannes Hevelius was a Polish astronomer in Gdansk who published detailed lunar maps in 1647 and described several cons...

Polish Lunar Early Modern Catalogs

8.0 Great

19

Williamina Fleming

Williamina Fleming was a Scottish-American astronomer at Harvard who classified thousands of stars and discovered the Ho...

Twentieth Century Women Spectroscopy Catalogs

8.0 Great

20

John Flamsteed

John Flamsteed was England's first Astronomer Royal, appointed in 1675, and produced the Historia Coelestis Britannica s...

British Observational Early Modern Catalogs

7.9 Good