Brandon Carter, FRS (born 1942) is an Australian theoretical physicist who explores the properties of black holes, and was the first to name and employ the anthropic principle in its contemporary form.

He is a researcher at the Meudon campus of the Laboratoire Univers et Théories, part of the French CNRS.

Together with Werner Israel and Stephen Hawking, he proved partially the no-hair theorem in general relativity, stating that all stationary black holes are completely characterized by mass, charge, and angular momentum.

In 1982 with astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet, he invented the concept of tidal disruption event (TDE), namely the destruction of a star passing in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole.

More recently, Carter, Chachoua, and Chamel (2005) have formulated a relativistic theory of elastic deformations in neutron stars.