Wallace Leslie William Sargent FRS[1] (February 15, 1935 – October 29, 2012) was a British-born American astronomer[5] and the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Astronomy at California Institute of Technology.

[1] Sargent spent the majority of his career at California Institute of Technology (Caltech),[2] excepting an absence of four years during which he claims to have had to go back to England to find himself a wife, Anneila Sargent.

He pioneered the detection of supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei using stellar dynamics, and published the first dynamical measurement of the mass of the black hole in the elliptical galaxy Messier 87.

[8] He supervised the theses of a number of students while at Caltech, including John Huchra,[3] Edwin Turner, Peter J.

Donald Lynden-Bell, Roger Griffin, Neville Woolf, and Wal Sargent were in the film Star Men that documented some of their professional accomplishments at their fiftieth reunion to redo a memorable hike.