The 2015 Oskar Klein medal awarded to Rashid Sunyaev

February 04, 2016

Professor Rashid Sunyaev, Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for astrophysics has been awarded the 2015 Oskar Klein medal by the Stockholm University and the Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Memorial lecture on "Unavoidable distortions in the spectrum of CMB and the Blackbody Photosphere of our Universe" took place on 4 February 2016 in the Oskar Klein Auditorium at the AlbaNova University Centre in Stockholm.

The citation reads: “Professor Sunyaev has made groundbreaking contributions to theoretical astrophysics in the areas of cosmology, high-energy astrophysics and X-ray astronomy through his studies of some of the most extreme physical processes in the universe. His theory of the evolution of density fluctuations in the early universe (developed with Ya.B.Zel’dovich) predicted the acoustic peaks that are observed in the cosmic background radiation. He has also made key contributions to the theoretical description of matter accreting onto black holes, predicting a signature for the resulting X-ray emission.”

The Oskar Klein medal is awarded by the Stockholm University and the Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is named after Oskar Benjamin Klein, a Swedish theoretical physicist who is known as one of the authors of the Klein-Gordon equation, Kaluza–Klein theory and the Klein–Nishina formula. The Oskar Klein medal is awarded since 1988. Among its 26 recipients are nine Nobel Prize laureates and eight world recognised cosmologists.

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