Sunyaev to Receive Cosmology Prize

Rashid Sunyaev, a pioneer in the field of physical cosmology and x-ray astronomy, will be awarded with the Peter Gruber Foundation’s 2003 Cosmology Prize this July at the general assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Sydney, Australia. The foundation, which is based in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, gives this prize each year to recognize individuals who have made groundbreaking contributions in cosmology. Sunyaev will receive a gold medal and a cash prize of $150 000.

Director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, and chief scientist at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Sunyaev is being honored for his “pioneering studies on the nature of the cosmic microwave background and its interaction with intervening matter.” He was “one of the most important and prolific members of the Moscow group that pioneered relativistic astrophysics,” adds the citation. With the group’s “illustrious leader [Yakov B.] Zeldovich, he studied the relic radiation from the Big Bang, leading to early tests of cosmological models that are still valid and have provided impetus to one of the most active areas of observational cosmology.”

Sunyaev’s contributions have had great import. He collaborated in landmark studies of the early universe and, with Zeldovich, was the first to describe what is known as the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. Also with Zeldovich, he predicted in 1970 the existence of acoustic peaks in the spectrum of angular fluctuations of cosmic microwave background radiation; the peaks were discovered in recent years (see Physics Today, August 2002, page 18 ). He and Nikolai Shakura developed a standard model of disk accretion onto black holes. And, more recently, Sunyaev led the international teams that constructed and operated the Granat orbiting x-ray observatory (1989–98) and the Kvant x-ray observatory (1987–2001) at the MIR Space Station.

He continues to work actively on the theory of the boundary layer between an accretion disk and the surface of a neutron star, on the physics of quasars and microquasars, on x-ray binaries as tracers of star formation in distant galaxies, and on turbulence in the hot gas in clusters of galaxies. And he is the leading Russian participant in the European Space Agency’s INTEGRAL gamma-ray observatory. “Through continuing collaborations around the globe,” says the foundation’s citation, “Sunyaev remains among the most effective scientific bridges between East and West.”