In the Dark

I’m delighted to be able to convey the news that the 2023 Gruber Prize for Cosmology has been awarded to Richard Ellis. Heartiest congratulations to him! The official announcement reads:

Over the past five decades Richard Ellis’s innovations have reimagined cosmology in fundamental ways. His observations have pushed the cosmic horizon—how far across the universe we can see—to a period close to the development of the first galaxies. Meanwhile the instruments he conceived, then shepherded through development and execution, have transformed myriad astronomical methodologies.

The full citation is here:

The Gruber Foundation is pleased to present the 2023 Cosmology Prize to Richard Ellis for his numerous contributions in the fields of galaxy evolution, the onset of cosmic dawn and reionization in the high redshift universe, and the detection of the earliest galaxies via the Hubble Ultra Deep Field study. 

Richard Ellis has also driven several frontier instrumental developments in optical astronomy, especially the use of multi-object spectroscopy to study many galaxies in the same field of view.  These included the “autofib” instrument, the “2dF” facility on the Anglo-Australian Telescope, which led to the discovery of baryon acoustic oscillations, the “LDSS” on the Herschel Telescope, which studied the redshifts of faint galaxies, and the “PFS” currently under commissioning on the Subaru Telescope to study dark matter and dark energy.

There’s a lot more information and biographical material in the full press release here.

If I can add just a couple of personal comments. Way back in 1985, when I was about to start my PhD DPhil, I attended an SERC summer school for new research students held in Durham. The lectures on Observational Cosmology at that school were delivered by Richard Ellis. I still have the notes, in fact. In many ways, this was my first encounter with modern cosmology. Quite few things have changed since then of course, but it was a formative experience. One thing I particularly remember is his discussion of the Hubble constant controversy:

 You will see that there were two main estimates, one low and one high, both about three sigma away from the currently-favoured value of around 70. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

The second comment is that Richard was the external member on the panel that awarded me my first Chair position way back in 1998. Gosh. Was that really 25 years ago? Still, it goes to show that even an eminent scientist such as Richard can sometimes make an error of judgement!