John A. Peacock

John A. Peacock, 1989

John A. Peacock (born March 27, 1956 in Shaftesbury (Dorset) ) is a British astronomer.

Peacock studied at Cambridge University (Jesus College) from 1974 to 1977 and passed the Tripos exams with honors. In 1980 he received his PhD with Malcolm Sim Longair and JV Wall at the Cavendish Laboratory (The radio spectra and cosmological evolution of extragalactic radio sources). From 1981 he was at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh , where he was given a permanent position in 1983 and head of research in 1992. At the same time he became professor of cosmology at the University of Edinburgh in 1998 (where he had an honorary professorship in 1994). From 2007 to 2013 he was head of the Institute for Astronomy.

He was a visiting scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study , the Observatory in Meudon near Paris, at Caltech , the Astronomical Institute in Honolulu , the Australian Astronomical Observatory and the Canadian Center for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto . In 2005 he gave the Sackler Lecture at the observatory in Leiden.

He deals with the formation and clustering of galaxies, the distribution of distant quasars and active galaxies, statistics of gravitational lens distribution and the environment of active galaxies and properties of stars in their neighborhood.

In 1994 he was a founding member of the Virgo Consortium for Supercomputing in Cosmology. From 1999 to 2005 he was chairman for Great Britain in the British-Australian 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey Consortium, which determines the large-scale distribution of galaxies on the basis of redshift.

In 2014 he received the Shaw Prize in Astronomy with Shaun Cole and Daniel Eisenstein . He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (2007) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2006).

As a hobby he plays classical music on the clarinet and is a mountain hiker and mountaineer.

Fonts

• Cosmological Physics, Cambridge University Press 1999

Web links

• Homepage in Edinburgh