Biography

Lynden-Bell attended Marlborough College and studied the Mathematical Tripos at Clare College, Cambridge completing his PhD with Leon Mestel in 1960. With collaborators, he published on the origins of the Milky Way, quasars and black holes and developed theories of ‘violent relaxation’ of systems of particles in changing potential fields affecting the orbits of star clusters and galaxies, ‘gravothermal catastrophe’ leading to the collapse of star clusters, and T-Tauri Stars, postulating the existence of the ‘Great Attractor’ resulting in the observed motion of galaxies. After a summer course at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1956, Lynden-Bell worked there from 1965 to 1972. In 1972, he was appointed the first director of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. Lynden-Bell received many honours and awards including the Karl Shwarzschild Medal (1983), The Eddington Medal (1984), the Brouwer Award of the American Astronomical Society (1991), the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1993), the Bruce Medal (1998) National Academy of Sciences, John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (2000), the first Kavli Prize for Astrophysics (2008) and was a Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He was one of four astronomers featured in the 2015 documentary, Starmen.

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