- Neil Degrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson (b. October 5, 1958 in New York City) is an African American astrophysicist and, since 1996, the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
- Hugh Ross
Hugh Norman Ross (born July 24, 1945) is a Canadian-born Old Earth creationist and Christian apologist. An astronomer by training, he has established his own ministry called Reasons To Believe that promotes a form of Old Earth creationism known as progressive creationism. Ross accepts the scientific evidence of the age of the earth and the age of the universe, but he rejects evolution and abiogenesis as explanations for the history and origin of life.
- George Smoot
George Fitzgerald Smoot III (born February 20 1945) is an American astrophysicist and cosmologist awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with John C. Mather for "their discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation". This work helped cement the big-bang theory of the universe using the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite.
- Willie Soon
Willie Wei-Hock Soon is an astrophysicist at the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is known for his views that most global warming is caused by solar variation. In addition to writing a range of technical papers on solar and stellar behavior, the physics of climate change, and an astronomy textbook for students who have no access to telescopes, …
- Mario Livio
Mario Livio (born 1945) is an astrophysicist and an author of works that popularize science and mathematics. He is currently Senior Astrophysicist at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute. He is perhaps best known for his book on the irrational number "phi": "The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number" (2002). The book won the Peano Prize and the International Pythagoras Prize for popular books on mathematics.
- Thomas Gold
Thomas Gold (May 22, 1920 - June 22, 2004) was an Austrian astrophysicist, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Gold was one of three young Cambridge scientists who in the 1950s proposed the now mostly abandoned 'steady state' hypothesis of the universe. Gold's work crossed academic and scientific boundaries, into biophysics, astrophysics, space engineering, and geophysics.
- Frank Drake
Dr. Frank Donald Drake (born May 28 1930, Chicago) is an American astronomer and astrophysicist. He is most famous for founding SETI and creating the Drake equation.
- John C. Mather
John Cromwell Mather (b. August 7, 1946 in Roanoke, Virginia), is an American astrophysicist and cosmologist. Mather is a senior astrophysicist at the U.S. space agency's (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with George F. Smoot for "their discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".
- Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe, born Tyge Ottesen Brahe, was a Danish nobleman from the region of Scania (in modern-day Sweden), best known today as an early astronomer, though in his lifetime he was also well known as an astrologer and alchemist. The Latinized name Tycho Brahe is usually pronounced or in American English, and or in British English. The original Danish name Tyge Ottesen Brahe is pronounced in Modern Standard Danish as.
- Alan Guth
Alan Harvey Guth (born February 27, 1947) is a physicist and cosmologist. Guth has researched elementary particle theory (and how particle theory is applicable to the early universe). As a junior particle physicist, Guth first developed the idea of inflation in 1979 at Stanford University after attending a Big Bang lecture by Robert Dicke. In 1981, Guth formally proposed the idea of cosmic inflation, …
- William Herschel
Sir Frederick William Herschel, FRS KH (15 November 1738-25 August 1822) was a German-born British astronomer and composer who became famous for discovering the planet Uranus. He also discovered infrared radiation and made many other discoveries in astronomy.
- George Gamow
George Gamow (March 4, 1904 - August 19, 1968), born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov (Георгий Антонович Гамов), was a Russian born theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He discovered quantum tunneling and worked on radioactive decay of the atomic nucleus, star formation, stellar nucleosynthesis, big bang nucleosynthesis, nucleocosmogenesis and genetics.
- Bernard Haisch
Bernard Haisch is a German-born American astrophysicist who has done research in solar-stellar astrophysics and stochastic electrodynamics. He has developed with Alfonso Rueda a speculative theory that the non-zero lowest energy state of the vacuum, as predicted by quantum mechanics, might provide a physical explanation for the origin of inertia, and more controversially, might someday be used for spacecraft propulsion.
- Kip Thorne
Kip Stephen Thorne is an American theoretical physicist, known for his prolific contributions in gravitation physics and astrophysics and for having trained a generation of scientists. A longtime friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking, he is the current Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech and one of the world’s leading experts on the astrophysical implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
- Saul Perlmutter
Saul Perlmutter (b. 1959) is an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and heads the Supernova Cosmology Project. Perlmutter is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
- Fritz Zwicky
Fritz Zwicky (February 14 1898 - February 8 1974) was an American-based Swiss astronomer. He was an original thinker, with many important contributions in theoretical and observational astronomy.
- Alan Boss
Alan P. Boss (born July 20, 1951, in Lakewood, Ohio) is an American astrophysicist. Educated at the University of South Florida and the University of California, Santa Barbara Boss is now a world leader in stellar and planetary system formation and the study of extrasolar planets, having published dozens of articles in this and related fields. He is currently a Staff Member at the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
- Hubert Reeves
Hubert Reeves is a Canadian (Québécois) astrophysicist and popularizer of science. He has been a Director of Research at the "Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique" since 1965 and currently lives in France where he often speaks on television promoting science. Born in Montreal, Reeves obtained a BSc in physics from the Université de Montréal in 1953, …
- Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS FRAS, Ph.D (born as Susan Jocelyn Bell, 15 July 1943) is anastrophysicist, who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars with her thesis advisor Antony Hewish.
- David Spergel
Dr. David Nathaniel Spergel (born March 25, 1961, in Rochester, New York) is an American theoretical astrophysicist and Princeton University professor known for his work on the WMAP mission. Professor Spergel is a MacArthur Fellow. He is currently the chair of the Astrophysics Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council and was once the W.M. Keck distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
- Clyde Tombaugh
Clyde William Tombaugh (1906-1997) was an American astronomer who discovered the dwarf planet Pluto in 1930. Tombaugh was born in Streator, LaSalle County, Illinois. After his family moved to Burdett, Kansas, Tombaugh built his first telescope and sent drawings of his observations of Jupiter and Mars to the Lowell Observatory. These resulted in a job offer. Tombaugh was employed at the Lowell Observatory from 1929 to 1945.
- Adam Riess
Adam Riess is an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute and is widely known for his research in using supernovae as Cosmological Probes.
- Karl Schwarzschild
Karl Schwarzschild was a German physicist and astronomer. He is also the father of astrophysicist Martin Schwarzschild. He was born in Frankfurt am Main. He was something of a child prodigy and had a paper on orbits published when he was only sixteen. He studied at Strasbourg and Munich, obtaining his doctorate in 1896 for a work on Jules Henri Poincaré's theories. From 1897, he worked as assistant at the Kuffner Sternwarte (Observatory) in Vienna, …
- Jayant Narlikar
Professor Jayant Vishnu Narlikar (Marathi: प्रा. जयंत विष्णू नारळीकर) is an eminent Indian astrophysicist. Narlikar is considered a leading expert and defender of the steady state cosmology. His work on conformal gravity theory with Sir Fred Hoyle, called Hoyle-Narlikar theory, demonstrated a synthesis can be achieved between Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and Mach's principle.
- Arthur Stanley Eddington
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM (December 28, 1882 - November 22, 1944) was an astrophysicist of the early 20th century. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity that can be radiated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour. He is famous for his work regarding the Theory of Relativity. Eddington wrote an article in 1919, "Report on the relativity theory of gravitation", …
- Harlow Shapley
Harlow Shapley was an American astronomer. He was born on a farm in Nashville, Missouri, and dropped out of school with only the equivalent of a fifth-grade education. After studying at home and covering crime stories as a newspaper reporter, Shapley returned to complete a six-year highschool program in only two years, graduating as class valedictorian. In 1907, at the age of 22, Harlow Shapley went to study journalism at University of Missouri.
- Janna Levin
Janna J. Levin (born 1967) is a theoretical cosmologist. She holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology granted in 1993 and a Bachelor of Arts in Astronomy and Physics from Barnard College granted in 1988.. Her work predicts a finite universe and uses techniques from topology and fractals to demonstrate this. Other work includes black holes and chaos.
- Chris Lintott
Chris Lintott is an astrophysicist. He is best known for his role as co-presenter of the BBC series "The Sky at Night" with Patrick Moore. He is also a co-author of the book "Bang! – The Complete History of the Universe" with Patrick Moore and Queen guitarist Brian May.
- Riccardo Giacconi
Riccardo Giacconi , the "father of X-ray astronomy," has received the Nobel Prize in physics for "pioneering contributions to astrophysics," which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources.
- Scott Tremaine
Scott Tremaine completed his BSc. at McMaster University in 1971, then received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1975. He held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and Cambridge University, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. From 1981 to 1985 he was in the Department of Physics at MIT as an Associate Professor.
- David Schramm
David Norman Schramm (October 25, 1945 - December 19, 1997) was an American astrophysicist. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned a Ph.D in physics at Caltech in 1971, and went on to become one of the world's foremost experts on the Big Bang theory and an early proponent of the theory of dark matter. Schramm received the Robert J. Trumpler Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1974, …
- Margaret Burbidge
Margaret Burbidge (born August 12, 1919) is a British astrophysicist, noted for original research and holding many administrative posts, including director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. During her career she served at the University of London Observatory, Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago, Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, the California Institute of Technology, …
- Joel Primack
Joel Primack is a professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and works at the Lick Observatory. Dr. Primack received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1970. According to his web site at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Dr. Primack's specific field of study is relativistic quantum field theory, cosmology and particle astrophysics.
- Allan Sandage
Allan Rex Sandage (born June 18 1926 in Iowa City, Iowa) is an American astronomer.
- Fiorella Terenzi
Dr. Fiorella Terenzi is an Italian astrophysicist, author and musician who is best known for taking recordings of radio waves from galaxies and turning them into music. She received her doctorate from the University of Milan but is currently based in the United States. Once described by talk show host Dennis Miller as "a cross between Carl Sagan and Madonna", Terenzi is known for her CD-ROM "Invisible Universe" which combines music and poetry with astronomy lessons, …
- Michael Foale
Colin Michael 'Mike' Foale, CBE, PhD, (born 6 January 1957) is an Anglo-American astrophysicist and a NASA astronaut. He is a veteran of six space shuttle missions and extended stays on both Mir and the International Space Station. He was the first Briton to perform a space walk, and holds the record for most time spent in space by a UK and US citizen: 374 days, 11 hours, 19 minutes. Born in Louth and raised in Cambridge, Foale was educated at The King's School, …
- Fred Adams
Fred Adams is an American astrophysicist who has made contributions to the study of physical cosmology.
- Walter Baade
Wilhelm Heinrich Walter Baade was a German astronomer who emigrated to the USA in 1931.
- William Alfred Fowler
William Alfred "Willie" Fowler (August 9, 1911 - March 14, 1995) was an American astrophysicist. He should not be confused with the British astronomer Alfred Fowler. Fowler was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from The Ohio State University and went on to receive a Ph.D. in nuclear physics at the California Institute of Technology. His seminal paper "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars" ("Reviews of Modern Physics", vol.
- Edmond Halley
Edmond Halley FRS (sometimes "Edmund", November 8, 1656 - January 14, 1742) was an English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist, and physicist.