The Karl Schwarzschild Medal, named after the astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild, is an award presented by the Astronomische Gesellschaft (German Astronomical Society) to eminent astronomers and astrophysicists. [1] [2]
Source: German Astronomical Society
Bohdan Paczyński or Bohdan Paczynski was a Polish astronomer notable for his theories and work in the fields of stellar evolution, accretion discs, and gamma ray bursts. He is the recipient of the Eddington Medal (1987), the Henry Draper Medal (1997), the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1999), and the Order of Polonia Restituta (2007).
Rashid Alievich Sunyaev is a German, Soviet, and Russian astrophysicist of Tatar descent. He got his MS degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 1966. He became a professor at MIPT in 1974. Sunyaev was the head of the High Energy Astrophysics Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and has been chief scientist of the Academy's Space Research Institute since 1992. He has also been a director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany since 1996, and Maureen and John Hendricks Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since 2010. In February 2022, he signed an open letter from Russian scientists and science journalists condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. The discovery eventually earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974; however, she was not one of the prize's recipients.
Hendrik Christoffel "Henk" van de Hulst was a Dutch astronomer.
Jeremiah Paul "Jerry" Ostriker is an American astrophysicist and a professor of astronomy at Columbia University and is the Charles A. Young Professor Emeritus at Princeton, where he also continues as a senior research scholar. Ostriker has also served as a university administrator as Provost of Princeton University.
Martin Schwarzschild was a German-American astrophysicist.
Donald Lynden-Bell CBE FRS was a British theoretical astrophysicist. He was the first to determine that galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their centres, and that such black holes power quasars. Lynden-Bell was President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985–1987) and received numerous awards for his work, including the inaugural Kavli Prize for Astrophysics. He worked at the University of Cambridge for his entire career, where he was the first director of its Institute of Astronomy.
Margaret J. Geller is an American astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Her work has included pioneering maps of the nearby universe, studies of the relationship between galaxies and their environment, and the development and application of methods for measuring the distribution of matter in the universe.
Erika Helga Ruth Böhm-Vitense was a German-born American astrophysicist known for her work on Cepheid variables and convection in stellar atmospheres.
Hugo von Seeliger, also known as Hugo Hans Ritter von Seeliger, was a German astronomer, often considered the most important astronomer of his day.
The Astronomische Gesellschaft is an astronomical society established in 1863 in Heidelberg, the second oldest astronomical society after the Royal Astronomical Society.
Reinhard Genzel is a German astrophysicist, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, a professor at LMU and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy", which he shared with Andrea Ghez and Roger Penrose. In a 2021 interview given to Federal University of Pará in Brazil, Genzel recalls his journey as a physicist; the influence of his father, Ludwig Genzel; his experiences working with Charles H. Townes; and more.
George B. Field was an American astrophysicist.
Eva K. Grebel is a German astronomer. Since 2007 she has been co-director of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Eva Grebel is an expert in the study of stellar populations and galaxy formation.
The Ludwig Biermann Award is an annual prize awarded by the German Astronomische Gesellschaft to an outstanding young astronomer. The prize is named in honour of the German astronomer Ludwig Biermann and was first awarded in 1989, three years after his death. Nominees for the award must be under the age of 35. The monetary value of the award is 2500 €, and it is intended to enable the awardee to make one or more research visits to an institute of their choice. Usually, only a single prize is awarded per year, but in a few cases, two prizes have been awarded.
Cornelis "Kees" de Jager was a Dutch astronomer who specialized in predicting solar variation to assess the Sun's impact on future climate. He was the General Secretary of the IAU from 1967 to 1973 and former director of the observatory at Utrecht. He was a fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and played an important role in the European skeptical movement as the first chairman of both Stichting Skepsis and the European Council of Skeptical Organisations.
Heino Falcke is a German professor of radio astronomy and astroparticle physics at the Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands). His main field of study is black holes, and he is the originator of the concept of the 'black hole shadow'. In 2019, Falcke announced the first Event Horizon Telescope results at the EHT Press Conference in Brussels.
Robert Eugene Williams is an American astronomer who served as the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) from 1993 to 1998, and the president of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) from 2009 to 2012. Prior to his work at STScI, he was a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona in Tucson for 18 years and the director of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory from 1986 to 1993.
Karl-Heinz Rädler was an astrophysicist at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam who worked on cosmic magnetic fields.