Michael Rowan-Robinson

(Geoffrey) Michael Rowan-Robinson FRAS FInstP (born 1942) is an astronomer, astrophysicist and Professor of Astrophysics at Imperial College London. He previously served as head of the astrophysics group until May 2007 and from 1981 to 1982, and as Gresham Professor of Astronomy.

Rowan-Robinson was educated at Eshton Hall School and the University of Cambridge where he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences as an undergraduate student of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He went on to complete a PhD on Quasars at Royal Holloway, University of London in 1969 supervised by William McCrea.

Rowan-Robinson's research interests include the Spitzer Space Telescope SWIRE project, the European Large Area ISO Survey, the UK SCUBA Survey (see James Clerk Maxwell Telescope), the IRAS PSC Redshift Survey, the Herschel Space Observatory SPIRE instrument and the Planck Surveyor HFI.

Rowan-Robinson co-supervised Brian May's PhD in Astrophysics initially supervised by James Ring and Ken Reay. He retired as president of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2008.

Publications

His publications and books include:

• The Cosmological Distance Ladder
• Universe
• Ripples in the Cosmos
• The Nine Numbers of the Cosmos
• Cosmology

Awards and honours

Rowan-Robinson was awarded the 2008 Hoyle Medal by the Institute of Physics for his research in infrared and submillimetre astronomy, and observational cosmology.

The asteroid 4599 Rowan, discovered in 1985 by Henri Debehogne at the European Southern Observatory, was renamed "Rowan" to honorMichael Rowan-Robinson.The credit notes that, even though Rowan-Robinson's contributions have been in extragalactic astronomy, he was able to use data from IRAS to set a limit on the number of undiscovered Jupiter-like planets beyond the orbit of Neptune.