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The Greek Shaw International Astronomy Award in Greek astrophysics

The international Shaw Prize in Astronomy for 2021 was awarded equally to the Greek woman astrophysical of the Diaspora Chryssa Kouveliotou, Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics at George Washington University and Corresponding Member of the Academy of Athens since 2016, and Victoria Kaspi, Professor of Physics and Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of the University of Athens magnetars. Magnets are neutron stars with very strong magnetic fields, which are associated with a wide range of high-energy astrophysical phenomena, according to the RES.

Neutron stars are superdense magnetized remnants of stellar explosions. They rotate at intervals of milliseconds to a few seconds and emit strong beams of pulsed electromagnetic radiation (hence the name “pulsar”). Due to their rotation, they are accurate “cosmic clocks” and “laboratories” for the study of various natural phenomena in gravitational fields billions of times stronger than Earth.

Kaspi and Kouveliotou’s research was based on the theoretical prediction of the existence of neutron stars with magnetic fields up to thousands of times stronger than those of simple pulsars, which produce strong c-ray flares. Electromagnetic radiation is fed mainly by huge reservoirs of magnetic energy in their magnetosphere and secondarily by their rotation. The winners developed new observational methods, which confirmed the existence of these objects and determined their physical properties. Their work established magnetars as a new and important class of astrophysical objects.

Chryssa Kouveliotou was born in Athens in 1956. She studied physics at the University of Athens and completed her postgraduate studies at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom in 1977. She received her PhD from the Technical University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute in 1981. She attended the University University of Athens and then in the United States, where she worked as a researcher at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. She has been a member of the US National Academy of Sciences since 2013 and has received a number of high honors and awards for her work.

The International Annual Shaw Prize has been awarded since 2004 by the International Foundation of the same name in collaboration with the International Astronomical Union.

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