swap_horiz Harlow Shapley 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

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

3

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

4

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

5

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

6

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

7

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

8

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

9

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

10

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

11

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

12

Icko Iben

Icko Iben was an American astrophysicist at the University of Illinois, known for stellar evolution theory and awarded t...

American Evolution Twentieth Century Stellar

8.7 Great

13

Robert Leighton

Robert Leighton was a prominent American physicist at Caltech noted for designing innovative telescopes and conducting e...

American Infrared Twentieth Century Surveys

8.7 Great

14

Clyde Tombaugh

Clyde Tombaugh was an American astronomer who discovered Pluto at Lowell Observatory in Arizona in 1930 through photogra...

American Planetary Twentieth Century Pluto

8.3 Great

15

Martin Schwarzschild

Martin Schwarzschild was a German-American astrophysicist who modeled stellar evolution and led Stratoscope balloon tele...

American Evolution Twentieth Century Stellar

8.2 Great

16

Herbert Friedman

Herbert Friedman was an American physicist whose rocket experiments helped found solar X-ray astronomy and ultraviolet a...

American Solar Twentieth Century X Ray

8.1 Great

17

George Wallerstein

George Wallerstein was an American astronomer at the University of Washington, known for stellar abundance work and earl...

American Twentieth Century Stellar Abundances

8.1 Great

18

Kent Ford

Kent Ford was an American astronomer and instrument builder whose spectrographs enabled Vera Rubin's galaxy rotation stu...

American Twentieth Century Dark Matter Spectroscopy

8.0 Great

19

George Herbig

George Herbig was an American astronomer known for Herbig-Haro objects and for identifying young intermediate-mass stars...

American Twentieth Century Stellar Star Formation

8.0 Great

20

Halton Arp

Halton Arp was an American astronomer known for the 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies and for controversial claims about q...

American Twentieth Century Galaxies Atlas

6.9 Fair