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The
Shaw Prize
is an annual award that was
founded by Hong Kong entertainment mogul and philanthropist Run Run Shaw in 2002.
The prize consists of awards in the fields of (i) astronomy,
(ii) life science and medicine, and (iii) mathematical sciences.
It was announced this week that the Shaw Prize for astronomy for 2023
was awarded to
Matthew Bailes, Duncan Lorimer and Maura McLaughlin for their
discovery of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), made with the Parkes 64m radio telescope, Murriyang.
The citation notes:
"FRBs are among the most extreme and mysterious phenomena in astronomy:
they are intense bursts of radio emission lasting only a few
thousandths of a second that contain as much energy as the Sun emits
over several days. The sources of the bursts are smaller than the
Earth but are as far away as distant galaxies. In a seminal research
paper written in 2007, Bailes, Lorimer, McLaughlin (with collaborators
Narkevic and Crawford) found the first FRB; deduced many of the
properties of its source, in particular its extreme distance, small
size, and enormous energy; estimated the cosmic rate of production of
FRBs; and highlighted their potential as cosmological probes.
Despite initial scepticism about whether this unique event was a real
astronomical source, the work by Bailes, Lorimer and McLaughlin
inspired others to search for these elusive events. By now almost a
thousand FRBs have been discovered. Telescopes based on novel
technologies are being designed and built specifically to find FRBs
and identify their host galaxies."
(Image credit: www.shawprize.org)
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