RAS Names Award Recipients

The UK’s Royal Astronomical Society announced in February the winners of its awards and medals for 2004. The Gold Medal, the society’s highest honor, is awarded annually in two categories.

Winning this year’s Gold Medal in Astronomy is Jeremiah P. Ostriker, Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. He was honored as “one of the world’s most influential researchers in theoretical astrophysics.” Most astronomers before the early 1970s assumed that nearly all of the mass in galaxies resided in visible stars. However, Ostriker “was probably the most important single figure in convincing the astronomical community that this very natural assumption was wrong, “ says the citation. The new model for galaxies he proposed was “the grandest revision in our understanding of galaxies since the early 1900s … [and] has now largely been confirmed by observations.”

Grenville Turner, research professor at the University of Manchester, is the recipient of the Gold Medal in Geophysics and Planetary Sciences. The award citation recognizes Turner as a “distinguished pioneer in the field of cosmochemistry … and one of the world’s leading planetary scientists.” His “pioneering work on rare gases in meteorites … led him to develop the ³⁹Ar–⁴⁰Ar dating technique that helped to establish the antiquity of meteorites and the precise chronology of lunar samples.” His most recent research has produced the first evidence of extinct plutonium-244 in Earth’s oldest known minerals.

The Chapman Medal went to Richard Harrison for his “outstanding contributions to solar physics.” He is a solar physicist and head of the space physics division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, UK.

The society presented its Herschel Medal to Keith Horne, professor of astronomy at the University of St. Andrews. He is acknowledged as “one of the world’s foremost observational astronomers in the study of cataclysmic variable stars and a leading authority in the UK on the search for extra-solar planets.”

Patrick Wallace received the Hanna Jackson (née Gwilt) Medal and Gift for his “notable contributions to the development of dependable and rigorous computer software for controlling telescopes.” He is an astronomy software consultant with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

The Royal Astronomical Society Award for Service to Astronomy went to Ian Corbett for his “exceptional service to astronomy and promotion of the subject in his career as a scientific administrator with the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) and its predecessor.” Corbett is now the head of administration at the European Southern Observatory in Munich, Germany.