| Citation | Rashid Sunyaev is the greatest Russian astrophysicist of our time. Together with Yakov Zel'dovich he was the first to understand that seeds of all cosmic structure should be visible in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Their predictions were verified by the COBE satellite 20 years after they were made. Sunyaev and Zel'dovich also predicted that shadow of hot gas in galaxy clusters should be visible on the microwave background. This also took more than a decade to verify. With his colleague Shakura, Sunyaev set out the equations which regulate how matter is accreted by black holes, and so set the stage for the observational study of black holes. |