Brent Tully grew up in Vancouver, Canada, where he attended the University of British Columbia. He obtained a PhD in astronomy at the University of Maryland in 1972. He spent the following year traveling in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, finally arriving in Europe where he took up a postdoctoral position at Marseille Observatory. In 1975 he joined the faculty at the University of Hawaii and has remained there since. In 1977, Tully, along with collaborator J. Richard Fisher,
discovered a way to calculate distances to galaxies. Measure the circular velocity of a galaxy, and you will know its intrinsic brightness; compare the intrinsic brightness with its observed brightness, and you can infer its distance (much as you could calculate the distance of a light bulb if you knew its wattage). The Tully-Fisher relation, to this day a standard tool in cosmology, would allow astronomers to endow the universe with a third dimension. Among awards that he has received are the 2014 Viktor Ambartsumian International Prize “for his fundamental contribution in the cosmology of the Local Universe.”, the 2014 Gruber Cosmology Prize "for his role in understanding the structure and evolution of the nearby universe", and the 2014 Wempe Award given by the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) “in recognition of his groundbreaking research about the structure of galaxies and the large-scale structure of the cosmos.” |