swap_horiz Walter Baade 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

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

8

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

9

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

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

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

13

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

14

Chushiro Hayashi

Chushiro Hayashi was a Japanese astrophysicist who described pre-main-sequence Hayashi tracks and calculated early-unive...

Cosmology Japanese Twentieth Century Stellar

8.6 Great

15

Ejnar Hertzsprung

Ejnar Hertzsprung was a Danish astronomer who related stellar color to luminosity, helping create the Hertzsprung-Russel...

Danish Twentieth Century Stellar HR Diagram

8.5 Great

16

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

17

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

18

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

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

Guillermo Haro

Guillermo Haro was a Mexican astronomer who discovered Herbig-Haro objects independently and founded Mexico's National I...

Mexican Twentieth Century Stellar Star Formation

7.6 Good