Wallace Leslie William Sargent (February 15, 1935 – October 29, 2012) was a British-born American

astronomer An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses their studies on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. They observe astronomical objects such as stars, planets, natural satellite, moons, comets and galaxy, g ...

and the

Ira S. Bowen Ira Sprague Bowen (December 21, 1898 – February 6, 1973) was an American physicist and astronomer. In 1927 he discovered that nebulium was not really a chemical element but instead doubly ionized oxygen. Life and work Bowen was born in Sen ...

Professor of Astronomy at

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

Education

Sargent was born in

Elsham, North Lincolnshire Elsham is a village and civil parish in North Lincolnshire, England. The population of the civil parish at the 2011 census was 400. It is situated north from Brigg, north from the M180 and west from the A15 road. The A15 (built in 1978) t ...

, the son of a gardener and a housecleaner, and grew up in

Winterton, Lincolnshire Winterton is a town in North Lincolnshire, England, north-east of Scunthorpe. The 2021 census found 4,765 inhabitants living in the town. Winterton is located near the banks of the Humber and is south-west of the Humber Bridge which can be s ...

. Sargent was the first person in his family to attend high school, and the first student from his high school to ever attend college. He received his bachelor's degree from the

University of Manchester , mottoeng = Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity , established = 2004 – University of Manchester Predecessor institutions: 1956 – UMIST (as university college; university 1994) 1904 – Victoria University of Manchester 1880 – Victoria Univer ...

in 1956, and his Ph.D. in 1959 from the same institution.

Career and research

Sargent spent the majority of his career at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), excepting an absence of four years during which he claims to have had to go back to England to find himself a wife,

Anneila Sargent Professor Anneila Isabel Sargent FRSE DSc (born Anneila Cassells, 1942, Kirkcaldy) is a Scottish–American astronomer who specializes in star formation. Biography Sargent was brought up in Burntisland, Fife, and schooled at Burntisland P ...

. Sargent carried out research in many areas of astronomy including

star A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma (physics), plasma held together by its gravity. The List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked ...

galaxies A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. ...

quasar A quasar is an extremely Luminosity, luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN). It is pronounced , and sometimes known as a quasi-stellar object, abbreviated QSO. This emission from a galaxy nucleus is powered by a supermassive black hole with a m ...

s and

active galactic nuclei An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a compact region at the center of a galaxy that has a much-higher-than-normal luminosity over at least some portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with characteristics indicating that the luminosity is not prod ...

, quasar absorption lines, and the intergalactic medium. He pioneered the detection of

supermassive black hole A supermassive black hole (SMBH or sometimes SBH) is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun (). Black holes are a class of astronomical obj ...

s in galactic nuclei using

stellar dynamics Stellar dynamics is the branch of astrophysics which describes in a statistical way the collective motions of stars subject to their mutual gravity. The essential difference from celestial mechanics is that the number of body N \gg 10. Typica ...

, and published the first dynamical measurement of the mass of the black hole in the elliptical galaxy

Messier 87 Messier 87 (also known as Virgo A or NGC 4486, generally abbreviated to M87) is a supergiant elliptical galaxy with several trillion stars in the constellation Virgo. One of the largest and most massive galaxies in the local uni ...

. He supervised the theses of a number of students while at Caltech, including

John Huchra John Peter Huchra ( ; December 23, 1948 – October 8, 2010) was an American astronomer and professor. He was the Vice Provost for Research Policy at Harvard University and a Professor of Astronomy at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Sm ...

, Edwin Turner,

Peter J. Young Peter John Young (31 July 1954—5 September 1981) was a British astrophysicist, who made major contributions in theory and observation to extragalactic astronomy and cosmology. During five years at the California Institute of Technology in 1976-1 ...

Charles C. Steidel Charles C. Steidel (born October 14, 1962) is an American astronomer, and Lee A. DuBridge Professor of Astronomy at California Institute of Technology. Life He graduated from Princeton University with an AB in Astrophysical Sciences, and from Cal ...

, and

Alex Filippenko Alexei Vladimir "Alex" Filippenko (; born July 25, 1958) is an American astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko graduated from Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California. He received a Ba ...

. He was director of the

Palomar Observatory Palomar Observatory is an astronomical research observatory in San Diego County, California, United States, in the Palomar Mountain Range. It is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Research time at the observat ...

from 1997 to 2000.

Donald Lynden-Bell Donald Lynden-Bell CBE FRS (5 April 1935 – 6 February 2018) was a British theoretical astrophysicist. He was the first to determine that galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their centres, and that such black holes power quasars. Ly ...

, Roger Griffin (Astronomer),

Neville Woolf Neville may refer to: Places *Neville, New South Wales, Australia *Neville, Saskatchewan, Canada * Néville, in the Seine-Maritime department, France * Néville-sur-Mer, in the Manche department, France *Neville, Ohio, USA *Neville Township, Pen ...

, and Wal Sargent were in the film

Star Men Star Men is a 2015 documentary film directed by Alison E. Rose that follows four British astronomers—Donald Lynden-Bell, Roger Griffin Roger David Griffin (born 31 January 1948) is a British professor of modern history and political theo ...

that documented some of their professional accomplishments at their fiftieth reunion to redo a memorable hike. The film also revealed the personalities of these men.

Awards and honors

Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy The Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy is awarded annually by the American Astronomical Society to a young astronomer (aged less than 36, or within 8 years of the award of their PhD) for a significant contribution to observational or theoretical ...

(1969) *

Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics The Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics is jointly awarded each year by the American Astronomical Society and American Institute of Physics for outstanding work in astrophysics. It is funded by the Heineman Foundation in honour of Dannie Heinem ...

(1991) *

Bruce Medal The Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal is awarded every year by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for outstanding lifetime contributions to astronomy. It is named after Catherine Wolfe Bruce, an American patroness of astronomy, and was firs ...

(1994) *

Henry Norris Russell Lectureship The Henry Norris Russell Lectureship is awarded each year by the American Astronomical Society in recognition of a lifetime of excellence in astronomical research. The idea for the lectureship came from then society President Harlow Shapley in 1945, ...

(2001) *Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1981 *The

Asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet of the inner Solar System. Sizes and shapes of asteroids vary significantly, ranging from 1-meter rocks to a dwarf planet almost 1000 km in diameter; they are rocky, metallic or icy bodies with no atmosphere. ...

11758 Sargent is named in his honor

Personal life

Sargent was married to fellow Caltech astronomer

from 1964 until his death. Although he became a U.S. citizen, he was born in Elsham, England. He was an atheist."Wallace Sargent". NNDB.com. Retrieved 17 July 2012.

References

20th-century American astronomers 1935 births 2012 deaths California Institute of Technology faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Alumni of the University of Manchester Fellows of the Royal Society English emigrants to the United States 20th-century British astronomers People from Winterton, Lincolnshire Winners of the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics People from Elsham, North Lincolnshire {{US-astronomer-stub