The High Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) of the American Astronomical Society has selected the winners for its top prizes for the upcoming year.

The 2016 Rossi Prize has been awarded to Professor Niel Brandt of Penn State University. Professor Brandt has led the effort to obtain the deepest fields with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, enabling the most sensitive cosmological X-ray surveys to date. His work traces the accretion history of supermassive black holes and their co-evolution with host galaxies across cosmic time.

“The Chandra Deep Fields have provided major insights about the demographics, physics, and ecology of supermassive black holes over most of cosmic time. These advances have come from more than 16 years of work by a superb and large team, and it has been an honor to work with them and also to see the broader community actively making Chandra Deep Fields discoveries,” said Brandt. “I expect these fields will remain a treasure trove of discovery in the coming decades, serving as a long-lasting Chandra legacy.”

HEAD awards the Rossi Prize for a significant contribution to high-energy astrophysics, with particular emphasis on recent, original work. The prize is in honor of Professor Bruno Rossi, an authority on cosmic ray physics and a pioneer in the field of X-ray astronomy. The prize includes an engraved certificate and a $1,500 award. Prof. Brandt will give a lecture at the 229th AAS meeting in Grapevine, Texas, in January 2017.

The 2016 HEAD Mid-Career Prize will go to Professor Sebastian Heinz of the University of Wisconsin at Madison for his work on unveiling the nature of the X-ray binary system Circinus X-1. This research showed that the birth fields of neutron stars span a much larger range than previously thought, and established the use of X-ray light echoes to make accurate measurements of distance across the galaxy.

“Our results on Circinus X-1 came about through a combination of careful planning, perseverance, serendipity, and the support from the Chandra operations team, to whom I am enormously grateful,” said Heinz. “It is wonderful to see close to a decade of work recognized this way.”

Such discoveries, the winners point out, were made possible by the entire Chandra team, including those who work on the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) instrument aboard the observatory.

Ashley King has been awarded the 2016 HEAD Dissertation Prize for her dissertation entitled “Outflows from Accreting Black Holes Across the Mass Scale.” Dr. King received her Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and is currently an Einstein and Kavli Fellow at Stanford University.

“I am honored to have received such recognition for my Ph.D. thesis. As we are just beginning to understand how outflows are formed from accreting black holes, I am enthusiastic about future discoveries,” said King. “Thank you to all my collaborators for sharing their knowledge and passion for science and astronomy.”

Dr. King and Professor Heinz will give their prize lectures at the upcoming HEAD Divisional meeting in Naples, FL, being held from April 3-7, 2016.

Contact:
Megan Watzke
617-496-7998
mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu

More information about HEAD AAS, its prizes, and upcoming meetings can be found at http://head.aas.org/ and https://aas.org/meetings/head15