The two winners of the second edition of the A&A awards for individuals in the initial stages of their careers were announced at the annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society in Valencia, Spain.
PhD prize
Adélie Gorce
Adélie Gorce did her undergraduate studies in Paris at CentraleSupélec, her Master's at the Imperial College London, and her PhD at Université Paris-Saclay. She is now a post-doc at McGill University in Canada. Her paper entitled "Improved constraints on reionization from CMB observations: A parameterization of the kSZ effect" and published in A&A, presents a novel way of parameterizing anisotropies in the CMB temperature distribution stemming from the interaction of low-energy CMB photons with the free electrons produced by reionization. Empirical relations and templates were, until now, used to model the contribution of reionization to the CMB power, leading to unreliable constraints. Adélie Gorce's work paves the way for a consistent analysis of ongoing and future CMB observations.
Early career prize
Yueh-Ning Lee
Yueh-Ning Lee did her undergraduate studies at the National Taiwan University, Taipei, her Master's at the Observatoire de Paris and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and her PhD at Service d’Astrophysique, CEA, Saclay. She then began her postdoc at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, and is currently an assistant professor at the National Taiwan Normal University. Her paper "Stellar mass spectrum within massive collapsing clumps - II. Thermodynamics and tidal forces of the first Larson core. A robust mechanism for the peak of the IMF," published in A&A, proposed a mechanism to explain the robustness of the peak of the initial mass function (IMF) to the environment. Yueh-Ning Lee has demonstrated, through a combination of numerical simulations and analytical work, that the peak of the IMF, that is to say the “characteristic mass of stars,” is determined by the thermodynamics of the high-density adiabatic gas and the stabilizing influence of tidal forces. The mass at the peak is proportional to the mass of the first hydrostatic core, or Larson core, which corresponds to the point where dust becomes opaque to its own radiation, and therefore it is directly related to the dust opacity.