ASTRONOMERS from Austria

Top 3

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Austrian Astronomers of all time. This list of famous Austrian Astronomers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Thomas Gold (1920 - 2004)

With an HPI of 53.98, Thomas Gold is the most famous Austrian Astronomer.  His biography has been translated into 30 different languages on wikipedia.

Thomas Gold (May 22, 1920 – June 22, 2004) was an Austrian-born astrophysicist, who also held British and American citizenship. He was a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society (London). Gold was one of three young Cambridge scientists who in 1948 proposed the now mostly abandoned "steady state" hypothesis of the universe. Gold's work crossed boundaries of academic and scientific disciplines, into biophysics, astronomy, aerospace engineering, and geophysics.

2. Edwin Ernest Salpeter (1924 - 2008)

With an HPI of 51.79, Edwin Ernest Salpeter is the 2nd most famous Austrian Astronomer.  His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.

Edwin Ernest Salpeter (3 December 1924 – 26 November 2008,) was an Austrian–Australian–American astrophysicist.

3. Maurice Loewy (1833 - 1907)

With an HPI of 51.48, Maurice Loewy is the 3rd most famous Austrian Astronomer.  Her biography has been translated into 18 different languages.

Maurice (Moritz) Loewy (15 April 1833 – 15 October 1907) was a French astronomer. Loewy was born in Vienna. Loewy's Jewish parents moved to Vienna in 1841 to escape the antisemitism of their home town. Loewy became an assistant at the Vienna Observatory, working on celestial mechanics. However, the institutions of Austria-Hungary did not permit a Jew to advance to a senior position without renouncing his faith and embracing Catholicism. The director of the observatory Karl L. Littrow was a correspondent of Urbain Le Verrier, director of the Paris Observatory and he secured a position there for Loewy in 1860. After going to France, Loewy become a naturalised French citizen. He worked on the orbits of asteroids and comets and on the measurement of longitude, improving the accuracy of the Connaissance des Temps. He also worked on optics and the elimination of the aberration of light. He was elected a member of the Bureau des Longitudes in 1872 and of the Académie des Sciences in 1873. Loewy became director of the Paris Observatory in 1896, reorganising the institution and establishing a department of physical astronomy. He further spent a decade working with Pierre Puiseux on an atlas of the Moon composed of 10,000 photographs, L’Atlas photographique de la Lune (1910), the definitive basis for lunar geography for over half a century. The crater Loewy on the Moon is named after him and asteroid 253 Mathilde is believed to be named after his wife. He died in Paris at a government meeting of a sudden and unanticipated cardiac arrest.