for his ground-breaking discoveries about millisecond pulsars, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, and other variable or transient astronomical objects. His contributions to time-domain astronomy culminated in the conception, construction and leadership of the Palomar Transient Factory and its successor, the Zwicky Transient Facility, which have revolutionised our understanding of the time-variable optical sky.
The Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2024 is awarded to Shrinivas R Kulkarni, George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science, Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, USA for his ground-breaking discoveries about millisecond pulsars, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, and other variable or transient astronomical objects. His contributions to time-domain astronomy culminated in the conception, construction and leadership of the Palomar Transient Factory and its successor, the Zwicky Transient Facility, which have revolutionised our understanding of the time-variable optical sky.
Although most stars shine steadily for billions of years, some of them vary, pulsate, flare or explode on timescales of years, weeks, or even a fraction of a second. These rapid changes provide unique insights into the death of stars, the behaviour of matter at extremely high temperatures and densities, the size and age of the universe, and aspects of fundamental physics such as the nuclear equation of state and Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Throughout his career, Kulkarni has made a sustained series of fundamental discoveries in time-domain optical and radio astronomy. As a student, he and his collaborators discovered the first millisecond pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star that emitted precisely spaced pulses over 600 times per second. Known millisecond pulsars now number in the hundreds. They are the most precise astronomical clocks in the universe, and are used to test Einstein’s general theory of relativity and to look for gravitational waves from merging supermassive black holes.
Shrinivas R Kulkarni was born in 1956 in Maharashtra, India and is currently George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science, Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), USA. He received his MS degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 1978 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, USA in 1983. He was a Millikan Research Fellow (1985–1987) in Radio Astronomy at Caltech. He has been on the faculty of Caltech where he was successively Assistant Professor of Astronomy (1987–1990), Associate Professor (1990–1992), Professor (1992–1996), Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science (1996–2001), MacArthur Professor (2001–2017) and George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science (2017–). He was also Executive Officer for Astronomy (1997–2000) and Director of Caltech Optical Observatories (2006–2018). He is a member of the Royal Society of London, the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the US National Academy of Sciences.
