Contribution: Gravitational Singularity Theorems and Hawking Radiation
The podium of the top 10 Astrophysicists is opened by the most famous persons in this field: Stephen Hawking. This name needs no introduction. Hawking’s most important scientific works include the gravitational singularity theorems in collaboration with Roger Penrose and the black hole radiation named after him; the Hawking radiation. Hawking was t.
Contribution: Hubble’s Law and Extra-Galactic Astronomy
The 4th spot on the list of top 10 Astrophysicists goes to Edwin Hubble. Along with Shapely, Hubble’s work on galaxies is noteworthy. In 1921, Hubble made a significant observation. He saw that farther a galaxy in deep space, faster it is receding away from us. This law came to be known as Hubble’s law. The law, however, was first derived by G.Lema.
Contribution: Pioneer of Radio Astronomy
Karl Jansky is one of the many unknown gems of astrophysics. He was an American Physicist who pioneered the famous field of Radio Astronomy. He was the first person to discover the radio waves emanating from the center of the Milky Way. Jansky was a radio engineer. He built an antenna designed to detect radio waves at the frequency of 20.5 MHz. It .
Contribution: Proposed The Existence of Dark Matter
The 8th spot on the list of top 10 astrophysicists goes to Fritz Zwicky. Zwicky was a Swiss scientist and a pioneer in the study of dark matter. While studying the Coma cluster of galaxies in 1933, Zwicky found an anomaly. The galaxies in the cluster were flying off at a speed far greater than what the equations predicted. He proposed that there is.
Contribution: Spectral Classification of Stars
Ever wondered what’s the classification scheme of trillions and trillions of stars in the Universe? Well, that came from a deaf woman, an American scientist, Annie Jump Cannon. She changed the face of astrophysics and brought stellar astrophysics on a firmer theoretical platform. We studied the spectral classification of stars in the 9th article of.
Contribution: The Chandrasekhar Mass Limit
Next in the list of top 10 astrophysicists is S. Chandrasekhar, the nephew of the Nobel Laureate Sir C.V. Raman. He was an Indian-American astrophysicist who spent most of his career in the United States. Chandrasekhar worked extensively in the field of stellar astrophysics. His work mainly includes the evolution of stars beyond the main sequence a.
Contribution: The Composition of Stars
Ceciliawas a British-American astrophysicist who, according to her colleagues, wrote the most brilliant doctoral thesis in Physics. In her thesis, she proposed that the stars are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. The importance of such a thesis cannot be explained in words. This fact is the first stepping stone to stellar astrophysics. The.
Contribution: The Ligo Observatory and The Gravitational Waves
The astrophysicists we discussed so far specialized in either experimental or theoretical astrophysics. However, the top two on our list were masters of both. Student of John Wheeler and a longtime friend of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, Kip Thorne is a Nobel Laureate in Physics. He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize for his contributions to LIGO that e.
What does an astrophysicist do?
An astrophysicist is a scientist who researches the principles of light
And natural forces as they pertain to the universe at large.
Astrophysicists engage in theoretical physics studies in an attempt to learn more about the underlying properties of the cosmos.
What was Saha's contribution to astrophysics?
Saha was the first scientist to relate the spectrum of a star to its temperature.
His work is foundational in the field of astrochemistry and astrophysics.
Saha also invented an instrument to measure the weight and pressure of solar rays.
His work on Halley’s comet is noteworthy.
