Martin Rees

Happy Birthday to Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal. He was born in Shropshire, England, in 1942. Rees studied theoretical astronomy and received his PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1967. His early research set the stage for today’s studies of cosmology and galaxy evolution. Rees’ theoretical work bolstered big bang theory, definitively ruling out the alternative steady-state model. He correctly proposed that black holes power active galaxies called quasars, and he was one of the first to predict that a supermassive black hole lies at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. More recently he has worked to understand the cosmic dark ages, the era of the universe just before the first stars lit up. Rees became the UK’s astronomer royal (a largely ceremonial title that comes with a salary of 100 pounds) in 1995 and served as president of the Royal Society from 2005 to 2010. (Photo credit: Festival della Scienza, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Date in History: 23 June 1942