Astrophysics has always been a field of interest of many. From kids to adults, everyone enjoys it and wants to learn about the secrets of the cosmos. Astrophysics can be defined as a theoretical discipline to understand the observable universe. While many tried to explore and discover the secrets, some people got success and made major contributions in the field. It’s their contributions that made understanding better and made astrophysics how we know it today. They answered many questions that paved the way for further researches. Below is the list of top ten astrophysicists who made it easier for us to understand the universe :
- Georges Lemaître
Born on 17 July, 1894, Georges Lemaître grew to become a renowned cosmologist and astronomer. This Belgian cosmologist formulated the most talked about theory which we know as the Big Bang. He explained the theory as a cataclysmic explosion of a small “super atom”. Georges also served as an artillery officer in the Belgian Army during the first World War. He also researched on cosmic rays and on the motion of three mutually attracting bodies in space. The genius died in the year 1966 but gave the world one of the most important theories that changed the way we look at cosmology.
- Martin Schwarzschild
Martin Schwarzschild was a practitioner of stellar structure and evolution. He made various important contributions in the field of astronomy and the development of the American Astronomical Community. He took a lot of inspiration from Arthur STnaley Eddington as he learnt the mechanism through which the stars vary in luminosity. He had great interest in pulsation theory of a class of variable stars called Cepheids and hence took on the task of studying how Cepheids pulsate.
- Jan Oort
Born on 28th April, 1900 in Netherlands, Oort’s full name was Jan Hendrik Oort. The Milky Way Galaxy as we know today has been a major contribution of Oort as well. Bertil Lindblad’s theory that stated that the Milky Way rotates in its own plane around the centre of the galaxy was confirmed by Oort in 1927 after doing various observations of star velocities. The theory was modified by him that took the form that was used afterwards. He also developed an astronomy school in Netherlands and in the year 1950’s he determined the distance of the sun as 30,000 light years from the centre of the galaxy and that it took 225 million years for the sun to orbit the galaxy.
- Karl Schwarzschild
In the year 1915, Karl gave the exact solution for the Einstein field equations of general relativity. This solution for the limited case of a single spherical non-rotating mass was given in the same year when Einstein introduced it. Karl’s solution led to the derivation of Schwarzschild radius which is the size of the event horizon of a non-rotating black hole. The astronomer died in the year 1916 succumbing to the disease pemphigus. As an honor, Asteroid 837 Schwarzschilda was named after him.
- Arthur Eddington
Born on December 28th, 1882, Eddington worked in multiple fields namely Astronomy, Mathematics and Physics. He was a phenomenal astrophysicist who investigated the motion, internal structure and evolution of stars. Eddington was also the first expositor of the theory of relativity in English language. He became the chief assistant at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in the year 1906. While he taught and lectured, he researched and did important studies in astrophysics and relativity. He believed that unifying quantum theory and general relativity would make it possible to calculate the values of universal constants.
- Stephen Hawking
With an IQ of 160, Stephen Hawking changed the way we look at the cosmos today. His intriguing lectures on Black holes made everyone gain interest in the subject. The legend was born on 8th January, 1942 and suffered amyotrophic lateral sclerosis which is an incurable degenerative neuromuscular disease. Though doctors announced that he would live for a short while but he continued his fight and his love for science made him surpass the given time. Hawking worked on space-time singularity and the theory of exploding black holes. He proposed that black holes emit subatomic particles and explode when they finally exhaust their energy. He wrote many books that made people develop interest in the subject. Hawking’s fight with the disease ended on March 14 in the year 2018 but he left us with major contributions in cosmology.
- Edwin Hubble
Edwin Powell Hubble was an American Astronomer, born on November 20, 1889 in Missouri. Powell did a major contribution in the field of extragalactic astronomy. He also assisted Robert Millikan for a year in the University of Chicago and was also selected as a Rhoes Scholar from Illinois in the year 1910. He studied reflection nebulae within the Milky Way and found Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy in the year 1923.
- S. Chandrasekhar
One of the most renowned astrophysicists, Chandrasekhar was born in the year 1910 in British India. He was home schooled while he was young and the Nobel Prize winner CV Raman happened to be his father’s brother. Chandrasekhar made a really substantial discovery that the massive stars collapse under their own gravity and reach enormous or even infinite densities. These stars in today’s terms are called neutron stars and black holes.
- Meghnad Saha
Born in British India in the year 1893, Meghnad made major contributions to the thermal ionization theory and its application to stellar spectra. Saha was born in a low caste family and led a hard life full of stereotypes and discrimination. Saha along with SN Bose published English translation of papers on relativity by Einstein and Hermann.
- Fritz Zwicky
Zwicky was a Swiss Physicist and Astronomer and was born on 14th February in the year 1898 in Varna Bulagaria. The astronomer made substantial contributions to the theory of supernovas. He also contributed in the study of solid state, gaseous ionization and thermodynamics. Zwicky also discovered the presence of dark matter which was a brilliant achievement in the field of cosmology.
