Rock Star pursues PhD in Astronomy

Brian May from Queen is writing an Astronomy book and picking up where he left off in the 70's on his thesis to get his PhD.

May was studying for his doctorate at Imperial College London when Queen, which he helped co-found with Freddie Mercury in the early 1970s, hit the charts with songs such as Bohemian Rhapsody and Killer Queen.

He gave up writing his PhD thesis, instead penning rock classics such as We Will Rock You, Fat-Bottomed Girls and Tie Your Mother Down. It was his guitar playing along with Mercury’s vocals that gave Queen its distinctive sound.

Within a few years he and Mercury, along with Roger Taylor and John Deacon, the other band members, had achieved global fame. Mercury died in 1991 from Aids but May has kept the band’s name going, promoting We Will Rock You, the hit West End musical in 2002, and touring with Taylor.

May is now making it clear that behind the facade of a rock demi-god there always lay a keen astronomer awaiting the chance to return to his unfinished thesis on the way light reflects from interplanetary dust particles.

He appears to have that chance. While working on the book, May has told senior astrophysicists he wants to complete his thesis and has persuaded them to assess it.

A major factor in that success was a research paper he published in 1974, entitled An Investigation of the Motion of Zodiacal Dust Particles, which remains a widely cited work.

An investigation of the motion of zodiacal dust particles