There is no Nobel Prize for astronomy

There is no Nobel Prize for astronomy. The terms of the Nobel bequest state that "The interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." It also lays out the prize areas. A long-stading question is why no prize was created for mathematics. Perhaps astronomy was omitted because Nobel considered there were few practical benefits. In actuality astronomy has had many practical consequences and uses that continue to this day.

It is interesting to speculate about astronomers that could have received a prize. One of the most notable is Edwin Hubble, the man the Hubble Space Telescope is named after. Hubble went to high school in Wheaton, near Fermilab. Wheaton was also home to Grote Reber, a gifted but unschooled astronomer, who was the first person to map out the radio signal from our galaxy with a steerable radio dish. In the early days of Fermilab I got a call from Reber asking about neutrinos. I explained how enormous neutrino detectors were.

That was the last we heard from him. Perhaps he should have followed his nose since Davis and Koshiba later received a Nobel prize in this area (see below). D. S. L. Soares has recently described the case for a Hubble prize. In any case there have been a handful of physics prizes that touched on cosmology, astronomy, and space science.