swap_horiz Jan Oort 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

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

4

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

5

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

6

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

7

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

8

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

9

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

10

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

11

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

12

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

13

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

14

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

15

Harlow Shapley

Harlow Shapley was an American astronomer who used globular clusters in 1918 to place the Sun away from the Milky Way's...

American Twentieth Century Clusters Galactic

8.7 Great

16

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

17

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

18

Maarten Schmidt

Maarten Schmidt was a Dutch-American astronomer who in 1963 identified 3C 273 as a quasar, showing it had a large cosmol...

Dutch Twentieth Century Redshift Quasars

8.6 Great

19

Gerard Kuiper

Gerard Kuiper was a Dutch-American planetary astronomer who discovered Miranda in 1948 and Nereid in 1949 and studied th...

Dutch Planetary Twentieth Century Kuiper Belt

8.4 Great

20

Bart Bok

Bart Bok was a Dutch-American astronomer known for work on the Milky Way and Bok globules, small dark nebulae linked to...

Dutch Twentieth Century Milky Way Nebulae

7.7 Good