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 on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. Astronomers observe astronomical objects, such as stars, planets, natural satellite, moons, comets and galaxy, galax ...

and the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Astronomy at

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

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) tr ...

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

Winterton, Lincolnshire Winterton is a market town and civil parish 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 Humbe ...

. Sargent was the first person in his family to attend high school, and the first pupil from his high school – Scunthorpe Technical High School – to ever attend university. He received his bachelor's degree from the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The University of Manchester is c ...

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 Anneila Isabel Sargent (née Cassells; born 1942) is a Scottish–American astronomer who specializes in star formation. Biography Sargent was brought up in Burntisland, Fife, and schooled at Burntisland Primary School and Kirkcaldy High S ...

. Sargent carried out research in many areas of astronomy including

star A star is a luminous spheroid of plasma (physics), plasma held together by Self-gravitation, self-gravity. The List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night sk ...

galaxies A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and 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 Sys ...

quasar A quasar ( ) is an extremely Luminosity, luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN). It is sometimes known as a quasi-stellar object, abbreviated QSO. The emission from an AGN is powered by accretion onto a supermassive black hole with a mass rangi ...

s and

active galactic nuclei An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a compact region at the center of a galaxy that emits a significant amount of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, with characteristics indicating that this luminosity is not produced by the stars. Such e ...

, 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 ...

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. Typic ...

, 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 Type-cD galaxy, supergiant elliptical galaxy, elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo (constellation), Virgo that contains several trillion s ...

. 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, Charles C. Steidel, 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 B ...

. He was director of the

Palomar Observatory The Palomar Observatory is an astronomical research observatory in the Palomar Mountains of San Diego County, California, United States. 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. ...

Roger Griffin Roger David Griffin (born 31 January 1948) is a British professor of modern history and political theorist at Oxford Brookes University, England. His principal interest is the socio-historical and ideological dynamics of fascism, as well as v ...

, Neville Woolf, and Wal Sargent were in the film '' Star Men'' 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 (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 Hein ...

(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 ...

(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—an object larger than a meteoroid that is neither a planet nor an identified comet—that orbits within the Solar System#Inner Solar System, inner Solar System or is co-orbital with Jupiter (Trojan asteroids). As ...

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

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sargent, Wallace 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