Bruce Alrick Peterson is a cosmologist based at Mount Stromlo Observatory of the Australian National University.

He was an undergraduate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and obtained his PhD, "A study of absorption and reddening using absolute magnitudes and colors of galaxies", in 1969 under the supervision of Maarten Schmidt at Caltech.

The effect, called the Gunn–Peterson trough,[2] should yield zero emission at wavelengths shorter than 1216 angstroms (after shifting for redshift) in the observed spectrum of the quasar.

[1] He played a major role in the MACHO Project that was conducted on a Mount Stromlo telescope to look for massive compact halo objects, a possible candidate for dark matter.

[2] In 2004, Peterson received a Thomson ISI Citation Laureate for his "outstanding contribution to Space Sciences in Australia".