May 23 :
In a ceremony held in Hong Kong on May 21, the award's foundation announced that the 2024 Shaw Prize in Astronomy would be presented to Shrinivas R Kulkarni, an Indian-American academic. The selection is based on Kulkarni's work on millisecond pulsars, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, and other variable or transitory astronomical events. He is the George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology.
His leadership, vision, and development of the Palomar Transient Factory and its successor, the Zwicky Transient Facility, have transformed our knowledge of the time-variable optical sky, according to the foundation's statement. "His contributions to time-domain astronomy culminated in these buildings," the foundation added.
"In order to conduct time-domain astronomy, which involves studying transient events, it is necessary to sift through massive databases, find unusual occurrences, eliminate false positives caused by terrestrial events and other sources, and alert the astronomical community as soon as possible, preferably within minutes, so that other telescopes can conduct follow-up studies," the statement went on to say.
According to the foundation, Kulkarni and his colleagues spotted the first millisecond pulsar when they were students. This neutron star was quickly revolving and released pulses 600 times per second that were perfectly spaced.
Pulsars are the most accurate cosmic clocks known to science; they help verify general relativity and search for gravitational waves emitted by supermassive black hole mergers.
When Kulkarni and colleagues calculated the distance to a gamma-ray burst in 1997, they achieved a major scientific milestone. They proved that the burst had to have been a very energetic event because it came from a faraway place in the cosmos, outside of our Galaxy. The majority of gamma-ray bursts originate from around the same distances, as we have learned.
There will be an award ceremony in Hong Kong on November 12th, and the prize is worth $1.2 million.
Kulkarni spent his formative years in Hubli, Karnataka, but was born in the Maharashtra village of Kurundwad. Kulkarni travelled to the United States to continue his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, after completing his master's degree at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi.
During the years 2006–2018, the astronomy professor oversaw operations at Caltech Optical Observatory.
In addition to his work to democratise astronomy through freely sharing data from his telescopes with astronomers worldwide, Scott Tremaine, who oversaw the 2024 Shaw Prize selection committee, remarked that Kulkarni deserves appreciation for this as well.
The Shaw Prize, sometimes called the Nobel for the East, has been given out every year since 2004 by the Shaw Prize Foundation. The late Run Run Shaw, a prominent Hong Kong film and TV personality and philanthropist, set up the charity.
