Richard Brent Tully (born March 9, 1943) is a Canadian-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, moons, comets and galaxies – in either ...

at the Institute for Astronomy in

Honolulu Honolulu (; ) is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Hawaii, which is in the Pacific Ocean. It is an unincorporated county seat of the consolidated City and County of Honolulu, situated along the southeast coast of the island ...

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; haw, Hawaii or ) is a state in the Western United States, located in the Pacific Ocean about from the U.S. mainland. It is the only U.S. state outside North America, the only state that is an archipelago, and the only state ...

. Born in

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anch ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central C ...

, and raised in

Vancouver Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

British Columbia British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, ...

, Tully's specialty is the astrophysics of galaxies. With J. Richard Fisher, he proposed the Tully–Fisher relation, which shows that the luminosity of a galaxy and the orbital velocities of its stars are correlated. This relation can be used to determine the distances of galaxies and, by inference, the size and age of the universe. His books ''The Nearby Galaxies Atlas & Catalog'' published in 1988 give the 3D locations for 2,400 galaxies within 130 million light years of

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surfa ...

. A particularly remarkable discovery was that our

Milky Way galaxy The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. ...

lies adjacent a vast underdense region that Tully called the

Local Void The Local Void is a vast, empty region of space, lying adjacent to the Local Group. Discovered by Brent Tully and Rick Fisher in 1987, the Local Void is now known to be composed of three separate sectors, separated by bridges of "wispy fil ...

. A more extended compilation of 30,000 galaxies within a cube of diameter 700 million light years centered on Earth can be visually navigated with the planetarium

computer software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

Starry Night Pro, where the data is called the ''Tully Database''. Tully, along with colleagues Helene Courtois, Daniel Pomarede, and Yehuda Hoffman, have compiled and analyzed galaxy distances and deviations of galaxy motions from cosmic expansion within the Cosmicflows program. Noteworthy discoveries have been the full extent of our home supercluster of galaxies, given the name Laniakea Supercluster, and of the adjacent, very large South Pole Wall of galaxies. Cumulatively, the large scale structure in the distribution of matter in a volume of diameter 1.3 billion light years centered on our location mapped by Tully and his colleagues reasonably accounts for the motion of our Local Group of galaxies of over 600 kilometers/second although there remains the possibility of influences from even larger scales. Brent Tully received numerous awards and recognitions, among which the

Viktor Ambartsumian Prize The name Victor or Viktor may refer to: * Victor (name), including a list of people with the given name, mononym, or surname Arts and entertainment Film * ''Victor'' (1951 film), a French drama film * ''Victor'' (1993 film), a French shor ...

and the

Gruber Prize in Cosmology The Gruber Prize in Cosmology, established in 2000, is one of three prestigious international awards worth US$500,000 made by the Gruber Foundation, a non-profit organization based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Since 2001, the G ...

, both in 2014.

References

External links

R. Brent Tully Personal Homepage
* * 1943 births Living people Canadian astronomers People from Toronto People from Vancouver {{US-astronomer-stub

See also

References

External links