天文学奖
2021

2021年度邵逸夫天文学奖平均颁予维多利亚・卡士比 (Victoria M Kaspi) 和赫里莎・库韦利奥图 (Chryssa Kouveliotou)，以表彰她们对理解磁星作出贡献。磁星是一种高度磁化的中子星类别，与很多壮观瞬变天体物理学现象有关。她们开发了新颖和精确的观测技术，从而证实具有超强磁场的中子星存在，并描绘出它们的物理特性。她们已将磁星确立为一种崭新而又重要的天体类别。维多利亚・卡士比是加拿大麦吉尔大学物理学教授暨麦吉尔太空研究所所长。赫里莎・库韦利奥图是美国乔治华盛顿大学物理系教授暨系主任。

中子星是恒星爆炸后的超压缩残余物。它们大多数快速自转，周期从毫秒到秒，并发出强大的电磁辐射光束 (表现为脉冲星)。因此，它们是精确的「宇宙时钟」，可以让人们在引力场比地球强几十亿倍的情况下进行基本物理测试。有关脉冲星的研究取得了两次诺贝尔物理学奖(1974年和1993年)。

The 2021 Shaw Prize in Astronomy is awarded in equal parts to Victoria Kaspi and Chryssa Kouveliotou for their contributions to the understanding of magnetars, a class of highly magnetized neutron stars that are linked to a wide range of spectacular, transient astrophysical phenomena. By developing new and precise observational techniques, they confirmed the existence of this new class of neutron stars with ultra-strong magnetic fields, and characterized their physical properties. Their work has established magnetars as a new and important class of astrophysical objects. Neutron stars are ultra-compact remnants of explosions of massive stars, which have exhausted their “fuel” for generating energy through fusion, and then collapse under their own gravity. Most young neutron stars are rapidly rotating with periods of milliseconds to seconds, and many of them emit powerful beams of electromagnetic radiation (observed as pulsars). As such, they are accurate “cosmic clocks” that enable tests of fundamental physics in the presence of a gravitational field many billion times stronger than that on earth. The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded twice for work on pulsars, in 1974 and in 1993.