I love it when celebrities embrace higher education. Especially when they do it under the radar, or years later than most. Like when Rivers Cuomo of Weezer graduated from Harvard, more than ten years from when he started. Or news that Shakira was taking classes at UCLA and no one even realized who she was. When I was in college Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver was in my art history class, and was about to finish his degree in finance. I am a huge fan of smart celebrities.AQQ

Though I don’t think there’s any comprehensive list of the smartest celebs out there, if there were I’m pretty sure Queen founder and guitarist Brian May would be near the top. May just finished publishing his doctoral thesis in astrophysics. I’m going to just give you a little bit of the highlights, since I have no idea what any of it means. Which tells you something about the usefulness of my degree.

The founder of the legendary rock band Queen has completed his doctoral thesis in astrophysics after taking a 30-year break to play some guitar.

Brian May’s thesis examines the mysterious phenomenon known as Zodiacal light, a misty diffuse cone of light that appears in the western sky after sunset and in the eastern sky before sunrise… May’s work focuses on an instrument that recorded 250 scans of morning and evening Zodiacal light between 1971 and 1972. The Fabry-Perot Spectrometer is located at the Observatorio del Teide at Izana in Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands.

The completed thesis appears as the book “A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud” (Springer and Canopus Publishing Ltd., 2008).

“I have thoroughly enjoyed my years playing guitar and recording music with Queen, but it’s extremely gratifying to see the publication of my thesis,” May said. “I’ve been fascinated with astronomy for years, and I was happy to finally complete my Ph.D. last year and record my studies of the Zodiacal Light in this book.”

[From Live Science]

For any of you science-y sorts, I bet you were just really impressed. For you liberal arts/soft science people like myself, I bet you were just really confused/impressed in theory. Though I don’t understand a word of it, I’ve got to say it’s pretty impressive for a guy to still care enough about astrophysics and academia to keep working on his PhD after thirty years.

Here’s Brian May appearing at the ‘46664’ concert honoring Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday at Hyde Park in London on June 27th. Photographer: Danny Clifford; Images thanks to WENN.