swap_horiz Edward Charles Pickering Alternatives

1

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

2

Claudius Ptolemy

Claudius Ptolemy was a Greco-Roman astronomer in Alexandria whose Almagest, written about 150 CE, formalized the geocent...

Ancient Geocentric Alexandria Catalogs

9.6 Brilliant

3

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

4

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

5

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

6

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

7

Henry Norris Russell

Henry Norris Russell was an American astronomer who independently plotted stellar luminosity against spectral type in 19...

American Twentieth Century Stellar HR Diagram

9.2 Excellent

8

Willy Fowler

Willy Fowler was an American nuclear astrophysicist who shared the 1983 Nobel Prize for explaining how elements form ins...

Twentieth Century Nucleosynthesis Stellar Nobel

9.1 Excellent

9

Martin Ryle

Martin Ryle was a British radio astronomer who developed aperture synthesis and shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics f...

Radio Twentieth Century Nobel Interferometry

9.0 Excellent

10

Vesto Slipher

Vesto Slipher was an American astronomer who measured spiral nebula redshifts from 1912, evidence later central to cosmi...

Twentieth Century Galaxies Spectroscopy Redshift

8.9 Great

11

Donald Lynden-Bell

Donald Lynden-Bell was a British theoretical astrophysicist who proposed in 1969 that quasars are powered by accretion o...

British Twentieth Century Black Holes Galactic

8.9 Great

12

Robert Dicke

Robert Dicke was an American physicist who advanced tests of general relativity and helped motivate the 1965 search for...

American Cosmology Twentieth Century Cmb

8.9 Great

13

Gerry Neugebauer

Gerry Neugebauer was an American astronomer at Caltech notable for his pioneering work in infrared astronomy and leading...

American Infrared Twentieth Century Surveys

8.9 Great

14

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

15

Walter Baade

Walter Baade was a German-American astronomer who resolved stars in Andromeda in 1944 and identified Population I and II...

German Twentieth Century Stellar Distance Scale

8.8 Great

16

Allan Sandage

Allan Sandage was an American astronomer who refined the Hubble constant and helped identify quasars while working at Mo...

American Cosmology Twentieth Century Distance Scale

8.8 Great

17

Nancy Grace Roman

Nancy Grace Roman was an American astronomer and NASA executive known as the mother of Hubble for her role in creating t...

Space Twentieth Century Women Hubble

8.8 Great

18

Eugene Shoemaker

Eugene Shoemaker was an American geologist and planetary scientist who founded astrogeology and co-discovered Comet Shoe...

American Planetary Twentieth Century Impacts

8.7 Great

19

Bengt Stromgren

Bengt Stromgren was a Danish astronomer who developed Stromgren photometry, a four color system used to classify stellar...

Danish Twentieth Century Stellar Photometry

8.1 Great

20

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