Wallace Sargent Statue Unveiled Outside His Junior High School

Wallace Sargent statue. Courtesy Anneila Sargent.

by Andrew Moseman  

In Winterton, England, Wallace Sargent still looks to the stars. 

Sargent, who passed away in 2012 at the age of 77, was the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, at Caltech, where he led a long and distinguished career in observational astronomy. Long before his Caltech days, the U.K. native attended Winterton Junior High School, where, in October, local artist Michael Scrimshaw unveiled a statue of Sargent gazing toward the heavens. 

The statue was created as part of a local event called Winterton 2022. Its chair Ian Dyer told Local Democracy Reporting Service: “The sculpture stands as a symbol of our shared history and collective ambition, showing the story of one of our own who began humbly and achieved incredible things.” 

A one-time senior research fellow at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, Sargent spent decades at Caltech. He served as Caltech's executive officer of astronomy from 1975 to 1981 and again from 1996 to 1997, and as the director of Palomar Observatory from 1997 to 2000. He helped to show that most of the helium in the universe was produced during the Big Bang and demonstrated the first dynamical evidence for the presence of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.

Read Caltech’s obituary for more about his amazing life.