Flemish astronomer Conny Aerts has won the Kavli Prize for astrophysics. This biannual Norwegian prize is one of the most important science prizes after the Nobel Prize.
Aerts conducts research into starquakes. “Stars are balls of gas and some of them really have tremors, just like the Earth has tremors,” she said in News and Co on NPO Radio 1. “Earth quakes show seismologists what physics and chemistry is in our planet. I do that for stars in the same way. We get a lot of information from that.”
The Dutch Research School for Astronomy calls her work “groundbreaking”. Her research has yielded “a wealth” of new discoveries about the mass, size, chemical composition and age of stars.
Role model
As a child, Aerts was fascinated by the stars. “Never underestimate a child’s curiosity, I always say. I lived in the countryside and always looked at the stars and wanted to know: what happens inside those stars? I made that my profession.” She hopes the attention she gets will inspire girls and young women. She wants to be a role model, she said against VRT News.
Aerts is affiliated with the University of Leuven, Radboud University in Nijmegen and a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She shares the prize with her Danish colleague Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard and the American Roger Ulrich. The prize is associated with a cash prize of 1 million dollars (938,000 euros).
In 2018 Ewine van Dishoeck of Leiden University received the Kavli Prize for astrophysics. There are also Kavli awards for nanoscience and neuroscience.
–
