Glass was educated at Trinity College Dublin where he was a Foundation Scholar.[1] He obtained his B.A. with first class honours in 1961 and was awarded the Hackett Prize for first place in Natural Sciences. He received his PhD in Physics[2] from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 for work in x-ray astronomy under George W. Clark.
Since 1970 he has worked in infrared astronomy and instrumentation[3] and he has written the standard textbook on the subject.[4]
He worked before 1975 at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and thereafter at the South African Astronomical Observatory.[5]
He is the author or co-author of over 220 scientific papers in journals and conference proceedings and has been cited nearly 10000 times with h-index=56.[6]
With Tom Lloyd Evans, he discovered the period-luminosity relation followed by Mira variable stars.[7] This result has subsequently been refined.[8][9] Later observations of the Miras in the SgrI Baade's Window field led to an independent estimate of the distance to the Galactic Centre.[10]
In 1973 Feast and Glass[11] discovered the infrared/optical counterpart of the symbiotic binary x-ray source GX1+4. In 1978 Glass located the obscured x-ray source Cir X-1 in the infrared and found that it flared in a cyclic manner associated with its 16.6-day x-ray period.[12]
The role of hot dust in the emission from a Seyfert galaxy (Fairall 9) was demonstrated observationally for the first time by Clavel, Wamsteker and Glass in 1989;[13] these observations were modelled theoretically by Barvainis[14] and provided a strong confirmation of the reverberation model[15] for active galactic nuclei. The photometry was part of a multi-year monitoring programme[16] that showed the ubiquity of infrared variability in these objects.
Work with the ISO satellite and MACHO data showed that all late-type M giant stars exhibit mass-loss and are variable.[17]
The most detailed image of the Galactic Centre (inner Bulge) region before the advent of array detectors was obtained with Catchpole and Whitelock in 1987,[18] showing up extinction patterns that correlated with the intervening molecular clouds.
In addition to papers on a number of historical themes, Glass has written several books (see below):
"Victorian Telescope Makers" was inspired by the extensive correspondence between Sir David Gill and the Irish telescope maker Sir Howard Grubb that survives at the South African Astronomical Observatory.
"Revolutionaries of the Cosmos" deals with eight figures (Galileo, Newton, Herschel, Huggins, Hale, Shapley, Eddington and Hubble) who revolutionised physical astronomy through the introduction of radical new ideas and techniques.
"Nicolas-Louis de La Caille" concerns the leading observational astronomer of the mid-eighteenth century who was also the first important scientist to visit what is now South Africa (1751–53). Inter alia, he conducted the first telescope sky survey, was a devotee of Newtonian dynamics and a pioneer of the Lunar method of navigation.
Glass received the Gill Medal[3] of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa in 1999 for his work in the infrared and their McIntyre Award in 2003 for his book on the Grubb Telescope Company (see below).
Glass, I.S. (1997) Victorian Telescope Makers: the Lives and Letters of Thomas and Howard Grubb, Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol and Philadelphia ISBN0-7503-0454-5.
Glass, I.S. (1999) Handbook of Infrared Astronomy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge ISBN0-521-63311-7.
Glass, I.S. (2006) Revolutionaries of the Cosmos – the Astrophysicists, Oxford University Press, Oxford, ISBN0-19-857099-6.
Glass, I.S. (2013) Nicolas-Louis de La Caille – Astronomer and Geodesist, Oxford University Press, Oxford, ISBN978-0-19-966840-3. French edition translated by James Lequeux, EDP Sciences (ISBN978-2-7598-0999-8) and Observatoire de Paris (ISBN978-2-901057-68-0).
^"PDS SSO". library.mit.edu. Retrieved 27 October 2017.
^ abLloyd Evans, T. (1999). "Gill Medal awarded to Ian Stewart Glass". Monthly Notes of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa. 58: 101–2. Bibcode:1999MNSSA..58..101.
^Glass, I.S. (1999). Handbook of Infrared Astronomy. Cambridge University press. ISBN0-521-63311-7.
^Glass, I.S.; Catchpole, R.M.; Feast, M.W.; Whitelock, P.A.; Reid, I.N. (1987). Kwok, S.; Pottasch, S.R. (eds.). The period-luminosity relationship for Mira-like variables in the LMC. Late stages of stellar evolution, Calgary, Canada, 2–5 June 1986. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing Co. pp. 51–4.
^Glass, I.S.; Alves, D.R. (2000). Lemke, D.; Stickel, M.; Wilke, K. (eds.). ISOGAL Survey of Baade's Windows. ISO Surveys of a Dusty Universe, Ringberg, 1999. Heidelberg: Springer. pp. 363–70. ISBN3-540-67479-9.