Best Astronomer

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is the Northern Irish scientist whose 1967 pulsar discovery opened a major field in radio astronomy.

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a Northern Irish astrophysicist who discovered the first radio pulsars as a Cambridge graduate student in 1967.

S. Chandrasekhar was an Indian American astrophysicist whose 1930 Chandrasekhar limit explained the maximum mass of stable white dwarf stars.

Bohdan Paczynski was a Polish astronomer at Princeton University notable for his pioneering work on gravitational microlensing and modeling gamma-ray bursts.

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

Dame Margaret Burbidge was a British-American astrophysicist and first author of the 1957 B2FH paper explaining how stars make heavy elements.

Jan Oort was a Dutch astronomer who established the Milky Way's rotation in the 1920s and proposed the distant comet reservoir called the Oort cloud.

William Herschel was a German-born British astronomer who discovered Uranus in 1781 and built large reflecting telescopes.

Lyman Spitzer was an American astrophysicist who proposed a space telescope in 1946 and led work on plasma physics and interstellar matter.

John Mather is an American astrophysicist who shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for COBE measurements of the cosmic microwave background.

Shri Kulkarni is an Indian-American Caltech astronomer known for work on pulsars, gamma-ray bursts, and optical transients; he won the 2024 Shaw Prize.

Rashid Sunyaev is a Russian astrophysicist known for the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, a key probe of galaxy clusters and the cosmic microwave background.

Henry Norris Russell was an American astronomer who independently plotted stellar luminosity against spectral type in 1913.

Ewine van Dishoeck is a Dutch astrochemist at Leiden Observatory, awarded the 2018 Kavli Prize for work on molecules in star and planet formation.

Joseph Taylor is an American physicist who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize for discovering the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar at Arecibo in 1974.

Didier Queloz is a Swiss astronomer who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet found around a Sun-like star.

Simon White is a British astrophysicist known for numerical simulations of cosmic structure formation and for developing the cold dark matter model.

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

Victoria Kaspi is a Canadian astrophysicist at McGill known for pulsars and magnetars, and she won the 2021 Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

Richard Ellis is a British astronomer at University College London notable for using gravitational lensing and deep field observations to study the high-redshift early universe.

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

Gerry Neugebauer was an American astronomer at Caltech notable for his pioneering work in infrared astronomy and leading the 1969 Two-Micron Sky Survey.

Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was a Persian astronomer who founded the Maragha observatory in 1259 and devised the Tusi couple geometric model.

David Jewitt is a British-American astronomer who, with Jane Luu, discovered 1992 QB1, the first known Kuiper Belt object beyond Pluto and Charon.

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

Aristarchus of Samos was a Greek astronomer who proposed a heliocentric cosmos in the 3rd century BCE and estimated Sun and Moon sizes.

Neil Gehrels was an American astrophysicist at NASA who notably served as the principal investigator for the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, launched in 2004.

Maria Zuber is an American geophysicist at MIT, principal investigator of NASA's GRAIL lunar gravity mission and first woman to lead a NASA robotic planetary mission.

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was a German astronomer who measured the first reliable stellar parallax, for 61 Cygni, in 1838.