Physicists and astronomers

Carl Wilhelm Wirtz

Carl Wilhelm Wirtz (1876–1939) was a German astronomer who, working statistically on spiral nebulae, introduced the K-term and produced the first velocity–distance relations, precursors of the Hubble diagrams.

Carlo Becchi

Carlo Maria Becchi was an Italian theoretical physicist at the University of Genoa who co-discovered BRST symmetry, foundational to gauge theory proofs, winning the 2009 Heineman Prize.

Carlo Marangoni

Carlo Marangoni (1840–1925) was an Italian physicist who showed in his 1865 doctoral thesis that liquid drops spread because of surface-tension differences, the Marangoni effect, and taught physics in Florence.

Carlo Rubbia

Carlo Rubbia, born 1934 in Gorizia, Italy, is an Italian particle physicist who shared the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the W and Z bosons at CERN.

Carlos A. Meriles

Carlos A. Meriles is an Argentine-born physicist at The City College of New York, appointed in 2004, who studies nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond for quantum sensing and data storage.

Carlos Frenk

Carlos Frenk, born 1951 in Mexico City, is a cosmologist at Durham University who helped originate cold dark matter theory and pioneered supercomputer simulations of how galaxies form.

Carlton M. Caves

Carlton M. Caves (born 1950) is an American theoretical physicist at the University of New Mexico known for quantum metrology and his 1981 proposal to inject squeezed vacuum into gravitational-wave interferometers.

Carole Jordan

Carole Jordan (1941–2026) was a British solar physicist who used ultraviolet and X-ray spectra as plasma diagnostics, and was the first female President of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Carolin Crawford

Carolin Crawford is a British astronomer who studies the massive central galaxies of rich clusters and served as Public Astronomer at Cambridge from 2005 to 2020.

Carolyn Porco

Carolyn Porco is an American planetary scientist who led the Cassini imaging team at Saturn from 2004 to 2017, known for her work on planetary rings and the geysers of Enceladus.

Carrie Nugent

Carrie Nugent, born 1984, is an American physicist who studies asteroids and comets, an associate professor at Olin College of Engineering, and author of the 2017 book Asteroid Hunters.

Carson D. Jeffries

Carson D. Jeffries (1922–1995) was an American experimental physicist and professor at UC Berkeley, known for work on nuclear magnetism, dynamic nuclear polarization, and chaos.

Carter Emmart

Carter Emmart is an American scientist and artist, director of astrovisualization at the American Museum of Natural History, where he directed the Hayden Planetarium's award-winning space shows.

Casey Pirnstill

Casey W. Pirnstill is a biomedical engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, who works in biomedical optics and received a 2025 PECASE award.

Catherine Cesarsky

Catherine Cesarsky is a French astrophysicist, raised in Argentina, who led the European Southern Observatory from 1999 to 2007 and was the first woman president of the International Astronomical Union.

Oct 15, 2026

CD-38 3220b

CD-38 3220b, better known as WASP-121 b and named Tylos, is an ultrahot Jupiter exoplanet discovered in 2015, orbiting its star every 30 hours about 858 light-years away.

Cecil Powell

Cecil Frank Powell was a British physicist at the University of Bristol who won the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the photographic method and discovering the pion in cosmic radiation.

Cecil Reginald Burch

Cecil Reginald Burch, known as Bill, was a British physicist and engineer who figured aspheric optical surfaces with extreme accuracy, producing the wide-aperture Burch reflecting microscopes.

Cecilia Garraffo

Cecilia Garraffo is an Argentine-trained astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory specializing in stellar magnetism and space weather around exoplanets, who founded the AstroAI Institute.

Cecilia Jarlskog

Cecilia Jarlskog is a Swedish theoretical particle physicist, professor emerita at Lund University, best known for the Jarlskog invariant, a convention-independent measure of CP violation in quark mixing.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, born Cecilia Helena Payne, was a British-born American astronomer whose 1925 thesis showed stars are mostly hydrogen and helium; in 1956 she became Harvard's first woman full professor.

Cefe López

Cefe López, full name Ceferino López Fernández, is a Spanish physicist and research professor at CSIC's Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid, known for random lasing.

Celso Grebogi

Celso Grebogi is a Brazilian-born theoretical physicist known for chaos theory and the OGY method of controlling chaos, developed with Edward Ott and James Yorke.

César Lattes

César Lattes, born Cesare Mansueto Giulio Lattes (1924–2005), was a Brazilian experimental physicist who co-discovered the pion in 1947, produced it artificially in 1948, and helped found Brazilian physics institutions.

Chad D. Fertig

Chad D. Fertig is an American atomic physicist at the University of Georgia known for experiments with ultracold atoms and Bose-Einstein condensates, and the 2007 PECASE award.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a theoretical cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire whose research focuses on axion dark matter; she wrote the award-winning book The Disordered Cosmos.

Chang C. Tsuei

Chang C. Tsuei (崔章琪) is a Chinese-American condensed-matter physicist who spent his career at IBM's Watson Research Center and won the 1998 Buckley Prize for tricrystal experiments establishing d-wave pairing in cuprate superconductors.

Changhuei Yang

Changhuei Yang (杨昌辉) is a Singaporean-born biophotonics researcher at Caltech known for optofluidics and Fourier ptychographic microscopy, and is returning to the National University of Singapore.

Charles Ahn

Charles H. Ahn, also published as C. H. Ahn, is an applied physicist at Yale University who studies complex oxide thin films and electronic control of superconductivity and ferroelectricity.