Jansky scholarship 2021 awarded to Mexican astronomer

Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and the National Radio Astronomical Observatory (NRAO) awarded the 2021 Karl G. Jansky Lecture Fellowship to Professor Luis F. Rodriguez of the National University of Mexico (UNAM). The Jansky Lectureship is an honor created by the trustees of UAI to recognize outstanding contributions to the advancement of radio astronomy.

Rodriguez is honored for his significant contributions to understanding star formation and x-ray emitting binary star systems, his distinguished career as an educator and popularizer of astronomy, and as a mentor to a generation. of radio astronomers. As a member of one of two teams that co-discovered the exits of star-forming regions, he has helped shape the current star-forming paradigm. With Felix Mirabel, he discovered the first microquasars of the Milky Way, close and smaller analogues of quasars in the heart of distant galaxies. They received the Bruno Rossi Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1996 for this work.

In 1992, Rodriguez secured a grant from the Mexican government to equip the VLA with its first 43 GHz receivers, allowing some of the first images of dust emission from protoplanetary disks around young stars – disks that would eventually produce planets. He was the founding director of the Institute for Radio Astronomy and Astrophysics at UNAM and is considered the father of radio astronomy in Mexico. Professor at UNAM since 1979, he supervised 28 student theses. He is the author or co-author of more than 500 scientific publications having received more than 25,000 citations.

Rodriguez received a bachelor’s degree in physics from UNAM in 1973 and a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard University in 1978. He received the Mexican Award of Sciences, the most important recognition in this country, the Robert J. Trumpler Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and is one of 40 members of the National College of Mexico, which brings together the country’s leading scientists and artists. He is a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and of the Royal Spanish Society of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences.

He is now Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Radio Astronomy and Astrophysics at UNAM and Coordinator of the Mesoamerican Center for Theoretical Physics in Chiapas, Mexico. He is working with NRAO on the selection of locations in Mexico for the key antennas of the proposed next generation very large network.

As the Jansky speaker, Rodriguez will be giving presentations, details of which will be announced later.

First awarded in 1966, the Jansky Lectureship is named after the man who, in 1932, first detected radio waves from a cosmic source. Karl Jansky’s discovery of radio waves from the central region of the Milky Way launched the science of radio astronomy.

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Other Jansky Prize recipients include seven Nobel Prize winners (Drs. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Edward Purcell, Charles Townes, Arno Penzias, Robert Wilson, William Fowler and Joseph Taylor) as well as Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, discoverer of the first pulsar, and Vera Rubin, discoverer of dark matter in galaxies.

The full list of past recipients is here:

https: //Science.nrao.education/Science/jansky-conference

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