Chandra Wickramasinghe

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Astronomer

ScientistsBorn 1939 · age 87

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Fame47.1

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Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe is a Sri Lankan-born British mathematician and astronomer.

Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

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Photos 2

An image of a clump of microorganisms from 41 km fluorescing on application of a carbocyanine dye (indicating viability) is shown in the left panel, and scanning electron microscope image of a similar clump is shown on the right panel.

Awards 3

2022Member of the Order of the British Empire

1992Vidya Jyothi

fellow

Connected to Chandra 4

Jennifer HomendyAlso won fellow

Marcia McNuttAlso won fellow

Gustavus SimmonsAlso won fellow Victor GuilleminAlso won fellow

Scientists born in the 1930s 2

Vladimir Bugrov47.3

Irina Beletskaya46.7

About this person

Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe is a Sri Lankan-born British mathematician and astronomer. His research interests include the interstellar medium, infrared astronomy, light scattering theory, applications of solid-state physics to astronomy, the early Solar System, comets, astrochemistry, the origin of life and astrobiology. A student and collaborator of Fred Hoyle, the pair worked jointly for over 40 years as the most famous proponents of a non-mainstream version of panspermia, the proposal that life was seeded on Earth through space-based processes. In 1974 they proposed that some dust in interstellar space matched the spectral characteristics of freeze-dried bacteria, which was largely ignored at its publishing while the ubiquity of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons explains the apparent match.

Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0