In the Dark

So I came back to Brighton this morning after a nice long weekend in Cardiff. I took the 6.28 train via Southampton to avoid London and got to the University of Sussex in time to chair the University Human Resources Committee, the usual Chair being unwell. Anyway, all this means that I’ve been a bit busy this afternoon and also a bit tired all of which adds up to no time for a long post.

Fortunately, some nice news appeared to give me a topic for a very quick blog post. Earlier today the winners were announced for the 2014 Shaw Prize in Astronomy. This year’s award actually goes to three cosmologists, Daniel Eisenstein from Harvard, Shaun Cole from Durham  and John Peacock from Edinburgh. The prize of a cool $1Million goes 50% to Eisenstein; the other half is shared equally between Shaun and John. Nice to see another British success!

The citation reads

for their contributions to the measurements of features in the large-scale structure of galaxies used to constrain the cosmological model including baryon acoustic oscillations and redshift-space distortions.

It seems clear that John and Shaun were awarded their half of the prize because of their important work on the Anglo-Australian Two Degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) and Daniel for leading a corresponding analysis of data derived from a survey of Luminous Red Galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

It’s a bit of a coincidence that baryon acoustic oscillations cropped up in this work, after my post last week about Sakharov Oscillations!

Anyway, congratulations to all three winners. No doubt they’ll be buying a few celebratory drinks for their colleagues in the very near future…

This entry was posted on May 27, 2014 at 4:54 pm and is filed under The Universe and Stuff with tags Daniel Eisenstein, John Peacock, Shaun Cole, Shaw Prize for Astronomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.