The Most Famous

ASTRONOMERS from United Kingdom

This page contains a list of the greatest British Astronomers. The pantheon dataset contains 644 Astronomers, 68 of which were born in United Kingdom. This makes United Kingdom the birth place of the 3rd most number of Astronomers behind United States, and Germany.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary British Astronomers of all time. This list of famous British Astronomers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of British Astronomers.

1. Edmond Halley (1656 - 1742)

With an HPI of 68.93, Edmond Halley is the most famous British Astronomer. His biography has been translated into 88 different languages on wikipedia.

Edmond (or Edmund) Halley (; 8 November [O.S. 29 October] 1656 – 25 January 1742 [O.S. 14 January 1741]) was an English astronomer, mathematician and physicist. He was the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, succeeding John Flamsteed in 1720. From an observatory he constructed on Saint Helena in 1676–77, Halley catalogued the southern celestial hemisphere and recorded a transit of Mercury across the Sun. He realised that a similar transit of Venus could be used to determine the distances between Earth, Venus, and the Sun. Upon his return to England, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, and with the help of King Charles II, was granted a master's degree from Oxford. Halley encouraged and helped fund the publication of Isaac Newton's influential Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). From observations Halley made in September 1682, he used Newton's law of universal gravitation to compute the periodicity of Halley's Comet in his 1705 Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets. It was named after him upon its predicted return in 1758, which he did not live to see. Beginning in 1698, Halley made sailing expeditions and made observations on the conditions of terrestrial magnetism. In 1718, he discovered the proper motion of the "fixed" stars.

2. Jocelyn Bell Burnell (b. 1943)

With an HPI of 68.33, Jocelyn Bell Burnell is the 2nd most famous British Astronomer. Her biography has been translated into 58 different languages.

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell (; née Bell; born 15 July 1943) is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. The discovery eventually earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974; however, she was not one of the prize's recipients. Bell Burnell was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004, president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 until October 2010, and interim president of the Institute following the death of her successor, Marshall Stoneham, in early 2011. She was Chancellor of the University of Dundee from 2018 to 2023. In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Following the announcement of the award, she decided to use the $3 million (£2.3 million) prize money to establish a fund to help female, minority and refugee students to become research physicists. The fund is administered by the Institute of Physics. In 2021, Bell Burnell became the second female recipient (after Dorothy Hodgkin in 1976) of the Copley Medal.

3. Martin Ryle (1918 - 1984)

With an HPI of 66.46, Martin Ryle is the 3rd most famous British Astronomer. His biography has been translated into 72 different languages.

Sir Martin Ryle (27 September 1918 – 14 October 1984) was an English radio astronomer who developed revolutionary radio telescope systems (see e.g. aperture synthesis) and used them for accurate location and imaging of weak radio sources. In 1946 Ryle and Derek Vonberg were the first people to publish interferometric astronomical measurements at radio wavelengths. With improved equipment, Ryle observed the most distant known galaxies in the universe at that time. He was the first Professor of Radio Astronomy in the University of Cambridge and founding director of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory. He was the twelfth Astronomer Royal from 1972 to 1982. Ryle and Antony Hewish shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974, the first Nobel prize awarded in recognition of astronomical research. In the 1970s, Ryle turned the greater part of his attention from astronomy to social and political issues which he considered to be more urgent.

4. Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944)

With an HPI of 65.93, Arthur Eddington is the 4th most famous British Astronomer. His biography has been translated into 59 different languages.

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944) was an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. He was also a philosopher of science and a populariser of science. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour. Around 1920, he foreshadowed the discovery and mechanism of nuclear fusion processes in stars, in his paper "The Internal Constitution of the Stars". At that time, the source of stellar energy was a complete mystery; Eddington was the first to correctly speculate that the source was fusion of hydrogen into helium. Eddington wrote a number of articles that announced and explained Einstein's theory of general relativity to the English-speaking world. World War I had severed many lines of scientific communication, and new developments in German science were not well known in England. He also conducted an expedition to observe the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 on the Island of Príncipe that provided one of the earliest confirmations of general relativity, and he became known for his popular expositions and interpretations of the theory.

5. Fred Hoyle (1915 - 2001)

With an HPI of 65.72, Fred Hoyle is the 5th most famous British Astronomer. His biography has been translated into 59 different languages.

Sir Fred Hoyle (24 June 1915 – 20 August 2001) was an English astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and was one of the authors of the influential B2FH paper. He also held controversial stances on other scientific matters—in particular his rejection of the "Big Bang" theory (a term coined by him on BBC Radio) in favor of the "steady-state model", and his promotion of panspermia as the origin of life on Earth. He spent most of his working life at St John's College, Cambridge and served as the founding director of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at Cambridge. Hoyle also wrote science fiction novels, short stories and radio plays, co-created television serials, and co-authored twelve books with his son, Geoffrey Hoyle.

6. William Lassell (1799 - 1880)

With an HPI of 64.36, William Lassell is the 6th most famous British Astronomer. His biography has been translated into 58 different languages.

William Lassell (18 June 1799 – 5 October 1880) was an English merchant and astronomer. He is remembered for his improvements to the reflecting telescope and his ensuing discoveries of four planetary satellites.

7. Antony Hewish (1924 - 2021)

With an HPI of 63.72, Antony Hewish is the 7th most famous British Astronomer. His biography has been translated into 67 different languages.

Antony Hewish (11 May 1924 – 13 September 2021) was a British radio astronomer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 (together with fellow radio-astronomer Martin Ryle) for his role in the discovery of pulsars. He was also awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969.

8. John Flamsteed (1646 - 1719)

With an HPI of 62.95, John Flamsteed is the 8th most famous British Astronomer. His biography has been translated into 53 different languages.

John Flamsteed (19 August 1646 – 31 December 1719) was an English astronomer and the first Astronomer Royal. His main achievements were the preparation of a 3,000-star catalogue, Catalogus Britannicus, and a star atlas called Atlas Coelestis, both published posthumously. He also made the first recorded observations of Uranus, although he mistakenly catalogued it as a star, and he laid the foundation stone for the Royal Greenwich Observatory.

9. James Bradley (1693 - 1762)

With an HPI of 62.69, James Bradley is the 9th most famous British Astronomer. His biography has been translated into 45 different languages.

James Bradley (September 1692 – 13 July 1762) was an English astronomer and priest who served as the third Astronomer Royal from 1742. He is best known for two fundamental discoveries in astronomy, the aberration of light (1725–1728), and the nutation of the Earth's axis (1728–1748). These two discoveries were called "the most brilliant and useful of the century" by Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre, historian of astronomy, mathematical astronomer and director of the Paris Observatory. In his History of astronomy in the 18th century (1821), Delambre stated:"It is to these two discoveries by Bradley that we owe the exactness of modern astronomy. ... This double service assures to their discoverer the most distinguished place (after Hipparchus and Kepler) above the greatest astronomers of all ages and all countries."

10. Stephen Gray (1666 - 1736)

With an HPI of 62.51, Stephen Gray is the 10th most famous British Astronomer. His biography has been translated into 33 different languages.

Stephen Gray (December 1666 – 7 February 1736) was an English dyer and astronomer who was the first to systematically experiment with electrical conduction. Until his work in 1729 the emphasis had been on the simple generation of static charges and investigations of the static phenomena (electric shocks, plasma glows, etc.). Gray showed that electricity can be conducted through metals and that it appeared on the surfaces of insulators.

People

Pantheon has 71 people classified as British astronomers born between 1075 and 1958. Of these 71, 3 (4.23%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living British astronomers include Jocelyn Bell Burnell, David C. Jewitt, and Robert H. McNaught. The most famous deceased British astronomers include Edmond Halley, Martin Ryle, and Arthur Eddington. As of April 2024, 4 new British astronomers have been added to Pantheon including Andrew Ainslie Common, Madge Adam, and Richard van der Riet Woolley.