Peter August Georg Scheuer (31 March 1930 – 21 January 2001) was a German-born British astrophysicist and radio astronomer, who made major contributions in theory and observation to extragalactic astronomy and cosmology.

Scheuer was born in Frankfurt am Main, of Jewish ancestry, and escaped to the UK in 1938,[1] where he eventually studied physics at the University of Cambridge.

[9] In due course, it would be demonstrated that the central source of energy was a supermassive black hole and the connecting jets would be imaged directly;[10] but Scheuer's early analysis was general and independent of this detailed evidence.

The first direct evidence for relativistic jets in active galaxies came when the high-brightness cores of quasars were seen via very long baseline interferometry to be ejecting blobs of emitting plasma with apparent transverse velocities greater than that of light.

Scheuer & Readhead realised that such motion would be accompanied by relativistic beaming and enhancement of the apparent flux density, leading observational selection to favour jets aligned with the line of sight.