Mercedes Richards was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and completed her undergraduate physics degree at the University of the West Indies before pursuing doctoral study in astronomy at the University of Toronto in Canada.
She went on to a career as a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University, where her research focused on interacting binary star systems — pairs of stars close enough that gas flows from one to the other. Richards became the first astronomer to systematically apply tomographic imaging techniques, similar in principle to a medical CT scan, to reconstruct three-dimensional models of the gas streams flowing between these stellar pairs, work that gave researchers an unprecedented ability to visualise dynamics previously understood only through indirect measurement.
Her tomographic method became a widely used tool in the study of binary star systems internationally, and she published extensively on stellar accretion and mass transfer throughout her career at Penn State, where she also mentored numerous graduate students in observational astrophysics.
In recognition of her scientific contributions, Richards was awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal by the Institute of Jamaica, one of the country's highest honours for achievement in science. She died on 3 February 2016.
- First astronomer to apply tomographic imaging to interacting binary star systems
- Developed a three-dimensional modelling technique widely adopted in binary star research
- Long-serving professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University
- Awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal by the Institute of Jamaica
- Borrowing a technique from another field can open a new one. Richards adapted tomography, a method associated with medical imaging, to solve an astrophysical problem no one had approached that way before.