Name↕ | Country↕ | Born↕ | Died↕ | Notable for↕ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Marc Aaronson | United States | 1,950 | 1,987 | His work concentrated on three fields: the determination of the Hubble constant (H0) using the Tully–Fisher relation, the study of carbon rich stars, and the velocity distribution of those stars in dwarf spheroidal galaxies. Aaronson was one of the first astronomers to attempt to image dark matter using infrared imaging. He imaged infrared halos of unknown matter around galaxies that could be dark matter. |
Hiroshi Abe | Japan | 1,958 | — | |
George Ogden Abell | United States | 1,927 | 1,983 | — |
Antonio Abetti | Italy | 1,847 | 1,928 | Abetti mainly worked in positional astronomy and made many observations of minor planets, comets, and star occultations. He computed the orbit of 170 Maria, a Main belt asteroid. |
Giorgio Abetti | Italy | 1,882 | 1,982 | — |
Charles Greeley Abbot | United States | 1,872 | 1,973 | — |
Charles Hitchcock Adams | United States | 1,868 | 1,951 | — |
John Couch Adams | United Kingdom | 1,819 | 1,892 | His most famous achievement was predicting the existence and position of Neptune, using only mathematics. The calculations were made to explain discrepancies with Uranus's orbit and the laws of Kepler and Newton. |
Walter Sydney Adams | United States | 1,876 | 1,956 | He is renowned for his pioneering work in spectroscopy. |
Saul Adelman | United States | 1,944 | — | |
Petrus Alphonsi | Spain | 1,062 | 1,110 | — |
Agrippa | Greece | fl. c. 92 CE | Agrippa observed the occultation of a part of the Pleiades by the southernmost part of the Moon. | |
Paul Oswald Ahnert | Germany | 1,897 | 1,989 | — |
Eva Ahnert-Rohlfs | Germany | 1,912 | 1,954 | — |
George Biddell Airy | United Kingdom | 1,801 | 1,892 | — |
Robert Aitken | United States | 1,864 | 1,951 | — |
Makio Akiyama | Japan | 1,950 | — | |
Abd Al-Rahman Al Sufi | Persia | 903 | 986 | Al-Ṣūfī was a major contributor to the translation into Arabic of the Hellenistic astronomy that had been centered in Alexandria, Egypt. |
Albategnius (see Al-Batani) | Syria | c. 858 | 929 | Al-Battānī's observations of the Sun led him to understand the nature of annular solar eclipses. He accurately calculated the Earth's obliquity (the angle between the planes of the equator and the ecliptic) |
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Albitzky | Russia | 1,891 | 1,952 | — |
Albumasar | Persia | 787 | 886 | While he was not a major innovator, his practical manuals for training astrologers profoundly influenced Muslim intellectual history and, through translations, that of western Europe and Byzantium. |
George Alcock | United Kingdom | 1,913 | 2,000 | Discovered comets C/1959 Q1, C/1959 Q2, C/1963 F1 and C/1965 S2. |
Harold Alden | United States | 1,890 | 1,964 | — |
Hannes Alfvén | Sweden | 1,908 | 1,995 | — |
Lawrence H. Aller | United States | 1,913 | 2,003 | — |
Viktor Amazaspovich Ambartsumian | Armenia | 1,912 | 1,996 | One of the 20th century's top astronomers, he is widely regarded as the founder of theoretical astrophysics in the Soviet Union. |
John August Anderson | United States | 1,876 | 1,959 | — |
Wilhelm Anderson | Estonia | 1,880 | 1,940 | Best known for his work on the mass limit for a white dwarf |
Marie Henri Andoyer | France | 1,862 | 1,929 | — |
Andronicus of Cyrrhus | Greece | fl. c. 100 BC | — | |
Anders Jonas Ångström | Sweden | 1,814 | 1,874 | — |
Eugène Michel Antoniadi | Greece/France | 1,870 | 1,944 | He made the first map of Mercury (although his maps were flawed due to incorrectly assuming that Mercury had synchronous rotation with the Sun) |
Masakatsu Aoki | Japan | 1,957 | — | |
Petrus Apianus | Germany | 1,495 | 1,557 | — |
François Arago | France | 1,786 | 1,853 | — |
Masaru Arai | Japan | 1,952 | — | |
Hiroshi Araki | Japan | — | ||
Sylvain Arend | Belgium | 1,902 | 1,992 | — |
Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander | Germany | 1,799 | 1,875 | — |
Felicitas Arias | Argentina | 1,952 | — |
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