Donald Lynden-Bell

Donald Lynden-Bell was a British theoretical astrophysicist who lived from 1935 to 2018, the first to determine that galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their centres and that such black holes power quasars. He was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1985 to 1987 and worked at the University of Cambridge for his entire career, where he was the first director of its Institute of Astronomy. He received the inaugural Kavli Prize for Astrophysics in 2008, shared with Maarten Schmidt.