Richard Ellis (astronomer)

Richard Salisbury Ellis (born May 25, 1950 in Colwyn Bay , Wales ) is a British astronomer . He is a professor at Caltech .

Richard Ellis at a conference in Garching in 2012

Ellis studied astronomy at University College London and at the Wolfson College of the University of Oxford , where he received his doctorate 1974th He then went to Durham University and the Royal Greenwich Observatory . In 1985 he became professor at Durham and in 1993 Plumian professor of astronomy at Cambridge University and a fellow of Magdalene College . From 1994 to 1999 he was director of the Astronomical Institute there. In 1999 he went to Caltech . From 2000 to 2005 he was director of the Palomar observatory there .

Ellis is an observing astronomer who is particularly concerned with the evolution of early galaxies and large structures in the cosmos. He was a member of the Supernova Cosmology Project , which determined the acceleration of the universe, for which its director Saul Perlmutter received the Nobel Prize in 2011. In the late 1990s he was involved in the Morphs Collaboration (with Alan Dressler , among others ), which investigated the evolution of various forms of galaxies. He explores early stars and galaxies, including using gravitational lensing and the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory .

He played an important role in the preparation of the planned Thirty Meter Telescope .

In 1995 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society , whose Bakerian Lecture he gave in 1998 (The morphological evolution of the galaxies). In 2008 he became a CBE . In 2011 he received the gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society .

Web links

• Homepage at Caltech