Kent Astronomers To Receive Prestigious International Prize

University of Kent astronomers Professor Glenn White, Dr Stephen Serjeant, Dr Toshi Takagi and collaborators, will be presented with the £10,000 Daiwa Adrian Prize 2004 at a Royal Society ceremony in London on Thursday 25 November.

The team have been awarded the prize in recognition of their pioneering work on the Japan-Anglo-Dutch ASTRO-F satellite, a powerful new space telescope which will make a map of the sky in far-infrared light.

Daiwa Adrian Prizes are triennial awards that recognise significant scientific collaboration between British and Japanese research teams. Established in 1992 and subsequently renamed to commemorate the late Lord Adrian, a founding Trustee of the Daiwa Foundation, submissions are judged on scientific quality, past performance, future potential and the likely long-term contribution to UK-Japan scientific relations.

The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation award, aimed at deepening scientific links between the UK and Japan, is supported by The Royal Society and The British Council.

The prize for the ASTRO-F project will be shared with Dr Seb Oliver and Dr Richard Savage (University of Sussex), Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson (Imperial College, London), and Professors Matsumoto, Shibai, Nakagawa and Drs Yamamura and Pearson (Universities of Tokyo, Nagoya, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA).

ASTRO-F will be the first all sky far-infrared satellite survey since the Infrared Astronomical Satellite mission launched in 1985, and is scheduled to be launched in the autumn of 2005. ASTRO-F should detect 10 million galaxies, trace the structure of the universe out to very high redshifts, detect the most luminous objects within the observable universe, map the structure of the Milky Way in our own galaxy, and detect young stars that are being born.

Glenn White, Professor of Space Science at the University of Kent, is Project Manager of the team, which is funded by the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research ZWO, to develop software for processing and analysis of the data. The satellite is currently being built by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA.

Commenting on the Daiwa Adrian Prize, Glenn White said: ‘We are pleased that Kent’s collaboration with Japan has been recognised and honoured with the award of this prize. The ASTRO-F mission will be one of the most important new space telescopes in the coming decade, and should open up a completely new view of the universe around us.’

Stephen Serjeant said: ‘This new space telescope will find things that are invisible even to the Hubble Space Telescope. Our work with the Japanese ASTRO-F team has been tremendously successful and it’s very exciting for our work to be recognised with this international prize.’