The Kavli Prize in astrophysics, for 2008, has been won by Maarten Schmidt of Caltech and Donald Lynden-Bell of Cambridge.
This is the first time the Kavli Prize is awarded, a biannual $1 million prize awarded in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience.
The nanoscience went to Brus and Iijima, and the neuro prize to Rakic, Jessell and Grillner.
Schmidt and Lynden-Bell get the prize for the discovery of quasars and the elucidation of the basic mechanism for powering quasars, namely accretion onto a supermassive black hole.
The Prizes will be awarded in September at a ceremony in Oslo.
The Kavli Prize complements the establishment of the numerous Kavli Institutes established at several different universities over the last few years, and is intended to "...reward younger scientists and not be seen as career achievement awards, as the Nobel Prizes sometimes are."
Both Maarten and Donald have worked on a diverse range of important astrophysical problems, ranging from star formation to cold dark matter, and we will certainly expect a lot more from these two young whippersnappers in the future!
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"Younger scientists". Very funny. 78 and 73, respectively.
Once when I was on a panel, an old guy objected to the use of the term "promising young scientist" on reviews. He said he'd only allow this if we'd call him a "promising old scientist".
The pictures of the nominating committee tells a lot.
It is a well earned prize.
The guidelines might need some iteration.
I'm deeply disappointed to discover that this prize has no apparent connection with the manufacturers of luminescent-pink caviare-in-a-tube.
Well, to be fair, it's not always clear whether the crazy ideas us young whippersnappers come up with will pan out. Both guys were not so old when they first started working on this stuff...