Back to This Week in Music History: July 29 - Aug. 4
August 3, 2007: Queen Guitarist Becomes Doctor of Astrology
Charley Galey, Getty
If someone said Queen were the sort of band that aimed for the stars, they might mean it literally. After all, in 2007 Queen guitarist Brian May finally obtained his PhD in astronomy a full 36 years after he began taking classes at Imperial College London.
The guitarist had abandoned his educational pursuits in the early '70s when Queen started getting popular, though he did author two academic papers back then: "MgI Emission in the Night-Sky Spectrum" (1972) and "An Investigation of the Motion of Zodiacal Dust Particles (Part I)" (1973). The thesis that got him his PhD was "A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud."
