Robert Quimby

Robert Quimby (born 1976) is an American astronomer who received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. As a lead member of the Texas Supernova Survey, Quimby and his team used the relatively small 18-inch ROTSE-IIIb robotic telescope on McDonald Observatory's Mount Fowlkes, along with a program he designed to track supernovae. In 2005, Quimby discovered SN 2005ap, at this writing the brightest explosion ever recorded. Quimby measured the burst at 100 billion times the luminosity of our sun, at a distance of 4.7 billion light-years. As a comparison, this supernova occurred 160 million years before the formation of the Earth. Quimby continues his research at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.