* Astronomy

Bruno Pontecorvo (Marina di Pisa, Italy, August 22, 1913 - Dubna, Russia, September 24, 1993) was an Italian-born nuclear physicist, an early assistant of Enrico Fermi and then the author of numerous studies in high energy physics, especially on neutrinos. According to Oleg Gordievsky (the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect) and Pavel Sudoplatov (former deputy director of Foreign Intelligence for the USSR), Pontecorvo was also a Soviet agent. He defected to the USSR in 1950, where he continued his research on the decay of the muon and on neutrinos. The prestigious Pontecorvo Prize was instituted in his memory in 1995.
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