Gerard F. Gilmore
| Gerry Gilmore | |
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Gerry Gilmore presenting first results from the Gaia space mission at the 11 November 2016 meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society
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| Born | Gerard Francis Gilmore 7 November 1951 Timaru, New Zealand |
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| Thesis | Observational extragalactic astronomy : an investigation of southern quasars and related objects (1979) |
| Doctoral advisor | Ken Fea |
| Known for | Discovery of the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy |
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Website www |
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Gerard Francis Gilmore FRSFRAS FInstP (born 7 November 1951) is Professor of Experimental Philosophy, in the Institute of Astronomy, at the University of Cambridge. His research has centred on studying stars in the Galaxy to understand its structure and evolutionary history.
Gilmore was educated at St Bede's College, Christchurch and the University of Canterbury, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in 1973.
Gilmore remained at the University of Canterbury as a postgraduate research student. He used the 0.61-metre telescope at Mount John University Observatory to monitor changes in the brightnesses of quasars in the southern hemisphere of the sky. He measured the magnitudes of about 130 quasars from a large number of photographic plates. He found the results were best explained by the infall of gas on to supermassive black holes. This research led to the award of a PhD degree in 1979.
Gerry Gilmore worked as a research fellow at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, Scotland, between 1979 and 1984. He used the expertise gained during his PhD to measure brightnesses and numbers of stars from photographic sky surveys. Working with Neil Reid with data from the United Kingdom Schmidt Telescope, he found an excess of faint stars compared to standard models of the Galaxy that represented the distribution of stars as two simple components. Gilmore and Reid argued the observed numbers of stars implied the existence of an additional component they called the thick disc that exists alongside the main Galactic disc and the stellar halo.
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