[4] Lynden-Bell was President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985–1987) and received numerous awards for his work, including the inaugural Kavli Prize for Astrophysics.

[9] In 1962, he published research with Olin Eggen and Allan Sandage[10] arguing that the Milky Way originated through the dynamic collapse of a single large gas cloud.

[8] In the 1980s, he was a member of a group of astronomers known as the 'Seven Samurai' (with Sandra Faber, David Burstein, Alan Dressler, Roger Davies, Roberto Terlevich, and Gary A. Wegner) who postulated the existence of the Great Attractor, a huge, diffuse region of material around 250 million light-years away that results in the observed motion of our local galaxies.

[18] Lynden-Bell, Roger Griffin, Neville Woolf, and Wallace L. W. Sargent were in the 2015 documentary film Star Men that covered some of their professional accomplishments at their fiftieth reunion to redo a memorable hike.

[22] Responding to news of his death, John Zarnecki, then President of the Royal Astronomical Society, praised Lynden-Bell's contributions to astronomy, particularly his "incisive questions at scientific meetings and being generous in his support for others".