Donald Lynden Bell

Donald Lynden-Bell CBE FRS (born 5 April 1935) is an English astrophysicist, best known for his theories that galaxies contain massive black holes at their centre, and that such black holes are the principal source of energy in quasars. He was a co-recipient, with Maarten Schmidt, of the inaugural Kavli Prize for Astrophysics in 2008. Lynden-Bell has been the president of the Royal Astronomical Society. He works at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge; he was the Institute's first director. Educated at the University of Cambridge, in 1962 he published research with Olin Eggen and Allan Sandage arguing that our galaxy originated through the dynamic collapse of a single large gas cloud. In 1969 he published his theory that quasars are powered by massive black holes accreting material. From counting dead quasars, he deduced that most massive galaxies have black holes at their centres.

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He was also a member of a group of astronomers known as the 'Seven Samurai' (Sandra Faber, David Burstein, Alan Dressler, Donald Lynden-Bell, Roger Davies, Roberto Terlevich, and Gary Wegner) who postulated the existence of the Great Attractor, a huge, diffuse region of material around 250 million light-years away that results in the observed motion of our local galaxies.

His wife is the Cambridge Professor of Chemistry Ruth Lynden-Bell.

Donald Lynden-Bell, Roger Griffin, Neville Woolf, and Wallace L. W. Sargent were in the film Star Men that documented some of their professional accomplishments at their fiftieth reunion to redo a memorable hike. The film also revealed the personalities of these men.

His current research mainly focuses on astrophysical jets and general relativity.