swap_horiz Johannes Hevelius 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

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

6

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

7

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

8

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

9

Giovanni Domenico Cassini

Giovanni Domenico Cassini was an Italian-French astronomer who discovered Saturn's ring division in 1675 and four of its...

Observational Planetary Early Modern Saturn

8.8 Great

10

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

11

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

12

Ole Romer

Ole Romer was a Danish astronomer who in 1676 used eclipses of Jupiter's moon Io to show that light travels at finite sp...

Danish Jupiter Early Modern Light Speed

8.6 Great

13

James Bradley

James Bradley was an English astronomer who discovered stellar aberration in 1728, providing evidence for Earth's motion...

British Early Modern Astrometry Aberration

8.6 Great

14

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

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

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

19

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

20

Jeremiah Horrocks

Jeremiah Horrocks was an English astronomer who predicted and observed the 1639 transit of Venus, the first recorded obs...

British Early Modern Transits Venus

7.5 Good