In 1995, he was awarded the Robert Ellery Lectureship of the Astronomical Society of Australia in recognition of his outstanding contributions in astronomy.
One of 33 Australian Science Citation Laureates (of which only nine are astronomers), he was the author of multiple high impact papers which are frequently cited by other scientists around the world.
Hunstead’s work on the Lyman alpha forest resolved much of the confusion surrounding the nature of the cloud population responsible for these absorption lines, by confirming that their comoving number density does indeed evolve with redshift.
[5] He also contributed to our understanding of the metallicity, dust content and star formation rate in high redshift galaxies from his comprehensive study of damped Lyman alpha systems.
More recently, he was involved in a study that showed radio loud quasars have distinct spectroscopic signatures that depend on their orientation and size.