Gold, Thomas (1920– )

Austrian-born US astronomer and physicist. In 1948 he formulated, with Fred Hoyle and Hermann Bondi, the steady-state theory regarding the creation of the universe.

Gold was born in Vienna and studied at Cambridge. In 1956 he emigrated to the USA and became professor of astronomy at Harvard 1958 and at Cornell University from 1959. Gold has served as an adviser to NASA.

The steady-state theory assumes an expanding universe in which the density of matter remains constant because, as galaxies recede from one another, new matter is continually created (at an undetectably slow rate). The implications that follow are that galaxies are not all of the same age, and that the rate of recession is uniform. With the discovery in the 1960s of cosmic background radiation, the steady-state hypothesis was abandoned by most cosmologists in favour of the Big Bang model.