Education
Aaronson was educated at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a BSc in 1972. He completed his Ph.D. in 1977 at Harvard University with a dissertation on the near-infrared aperture photometry of galaxies. He joined Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in 1977 and became an Associate Professor of Astronomy in 1983. Aaronson and Jeremy Mould won the George Van Biesbroeck Prize in 1981 and the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy in 1984 from the American Astronomical Society. He was also awarded the Bart J. Bok Prize in 1983 from Harvard University.
His work concentrated on three fields: the determination of the Hubble constant (H0) using the Tully-Fisher relation, the study of carbon rich stars, and the velocity distribution of those stars in dwarf spheroidal galaxies.
Aaronson was one of the first astronomers to attempt to image dark matter using infrared imaging. He imaged infrared halos of unknown matter around galaxies that could be dark matter.
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)