Gösta Lyngå was born in Malmö, Sweden, on 9 August 1930. He studied at Lund University with PhD in Astronomy. He worked as a lecturer at Lund University from 1952 – 1998. While there he spent several years at observatories in South Africa, Australia and Chile. In Australia in 1961, he met and married his Australian wife, Pauline, and through the ’60s they moved between Sweden and Canberra, eventually settling in Sweden in 1969 with their three daughters. In 1964 he published Studies of the Milky Way from Centaurus to Norma. II. Open Clusters, which contained 14 open clusters. Lyngå 10 turned out to be Pişmiş 23, and in 1993 Ortolani et al. determined that Lyngå 7 is in actual fact a globular cluster.

Gösta Lyngå. Image credit: ACT Greens

In Sweden, Gösta became involved in Miljöpartiet de gröna (the Swedish Greens) and local politics. He was a local councillor from 1985 to 1988, and then an elected Member of the Swedish Parliament until 1991, where he held the taxation portfolio for the Greens.

In 1991, he and Pauline brought their family of three back to Canberra and settled in Duffy. He was a founding member of ACT Greens and Australian Greens in 1992, and served with them until 2021, when he returned to Sweden to be near to his family.