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Loading contentThe people who changed how we see the cosmos.
Adam Riess carried out much of the analysis that revealed cosmic acceleration for the High-z Supernova Search Team in 1998. He has since led precise measurements of the universe's expansion rate that hint at gaps in our cosmological model.
Al-Battani was among the most influential astronomers of the medieval Islamic world, observing from Raqqa in present-day Syria.
Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, known in Latin as Azophi, revised Ptolemy's star catalogue against his own observations in his Book of Fixed Stars.
Albert Einstein reshaped our understanding of space, time, and gravity. His 1905 theory of special relativity and 1915 theory of general relativity form the foundation of modern cosmology, predicting the expansion of the Universe, black…
Andrea Ghez used the Keck telescopes and adaptive optics to follow stars orbiting the centre of the Milky Way with extraordinary precision.
An American astronomer who developed the stellar spectral classification system still in use today.
Arno Penzias, with Robert Wilson at Bell Labs, detected a faint, uniform microwave hiss coming from every direction in the sky.
Aryabhata was the first of the great mathematician-astronomers of classical India.
An American astronomer and planetary scientist celebrated for his research and his work communicating science to the public.
A German-British astronomer who discovered several comets and was among the first women paid for scientific work.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin discovered what stars are made of. Her 1925 doctoral thesis applied new atomic physics to stellar spectra and concluded that the Sun and stars are composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium — a result so…
Charles Messier was a dedicated French comet-hunter who grew tired of mistaking fuzzy, unmoving objects for comets. To avoid the confusion he listed them — galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters — in a catalogue of about 110 entries.
Christiaan Huygens was a Dutch polymath who built superb telescopes of his own design.
Edmond Halley was an English astronomer who computed the orbit of the comet that now bears his name and predicted its return.
Edward Charles Pickering directed the Harvard College Observatory from 1877 to 1919 and built the program of stellar spectroscopy and photography that produced the Henry Draper Catalogue.
Edwin Hubble was an American astronomer whose observations established that the universe is expanding and that galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way.
Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer and physicist who pioneered telescopic astronomy, discovering the four largest moons of Jupiter.
Georges Lemaître was a Belgian priest and physicist who, in 1927, derived an expanding universe from general relativity and estimated its rate of expansion — two years before Hubble's observations.
Giovanni Domenico Cassini was the founding director of the Paris Observatory. He discovered four of Saturn's moons and the dark gap in its rings now called the Cassini Division, and his measurement of the parallax of Mars helped fix the…
An American astronomer whose discovery of the Cepheid period–luminosity relation gave astronomers a way to measure cosmic distances.
Henry Draper was an American physician and pioneer of astrophotography. In 1872 he made the first photograph showing the spectral lines of a star, Vega, and in 1880 he captured the first photograph of the Orion Nebula.
An ancient Greek astronomer credited with compiling an early star catalogue and discovering the precession of the equinoxes.
Jane Luu, with David Jewitt, spent five years searching for objects beyond Neptune and in 1992 found the first one, (15760) Albion.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars as a graduate student at Cambridge in 1967, spotting an impossibly regular radio signal her team nicknamed 'LGM-1'.
Johann Galle was the astronomer at the Berlin Observatory who, on 23 September 1846, pointed his telescope where Urbain Le Verrier's calculations predicted and found Neptune almost at once.
Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer who formulated the three laws of planetary motion.
John Herschel, son of William, extended the family's surveys to the southern skies from the Cape of Good Hope. His General Catalogue of nebulae and clusters became the backbone of the later New General Catalogue (NGC).
Maarten Schmidt cracked the mystery of quasars. In 1963 he realised that the strange spectrum of the radio source 3C 273 was ordinary hydrogen shifted far to the red, placing the object billions of light-years away — and meaning it shone…
Michel Mayor, with his student Didier Queloz, discovered 51 Pegasi b in 1995 — the first planet found orbiting a normal star like the Sun. The unexpected 'hot Jupiter' opened the entire field of exoplanet science.
An American astronomer and NASA's first chief of astronomy, often called the 'Mother of Hubble' for her role in space-based astronomy.
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi built the great observatory at Maragha, one of the most advanced research institutions of its age.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and the director of New York's Hayden Planetarium, and the most prominent science communicator of his generation.
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance astronomer who formulated the heliocentric model placing the Sun at the center of the universe.
Reinhard Genzel led one of two teams that, over decades, tracked the orbits of stars whipping around the centre of the Milky Way.
Robert Wilson, with Arno Penzias, discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 using a sensitive horn antenna at Bell Labs.
Saul Perlmutter led the Supernova Cosmology Project, one of two teams using distant Type Ia supernovae as standard candles to measure the history of cosmic expansion.
Stephen Hawking united general relativity and quantum mechanics at the edge of black holes, predicting in 1974 that they slowly radiate and shrink — Hawking radiation.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian-American astrophysicist known for the Chandrasekhar limit on white dwarf mass, for which he shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Ulugh Beg was a Timurid ruler and astronomer who built a monumental observatory at Samarkand with an enormous meridian arc.
Urbain Le Verrier predicted the planet Neptune using mathematics alone. From small irregularities in the orbit of Uranus he calculated where an unseen planet must lie, and on the very night his prediction reached Berlin in 1846 the planet…