Biermann Award for Eduardo Bañados
Eduardo Bañados, a staff scientist in the Galaxies and Cosmology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, has been named the recipient of the German Astronomical Society's 2019 Ludwig Biermann Award.
![Eduardo Bañados](/4945126/original-1568141011.jpg?t=eyJ3aWR0aCI6MjQ2LCJvYmpfaWQiOjQ5NDUxMjZ9--1c360ac8617f975e5432e33e8bf3c3b7b7abd71e)
The German Astronomical Society (Astronomische Gesellschaft) has honoured MPIA staff scientist Eduardo Bañados with its Ludwig Biermann Award. The Ludwig Biermann Award is conferred annually on an outstanding young astronomer. Bañados received the award for his search for the earliest and most distant quasars in the universe. The citation specifically points out his discovery of the most distant known quasar, so distant that we see it at a time when the universe was a mere 690 million years old (cf. this MPIA press release from 2017).
After completing his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in 2015, under the supervision of Fabian Walter, and staying on as a postdoctoral research until October of that year, Bañados took up a prestigious Carnegie-Princeton fellowship at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences of Princeton University. In February 2019, he returned to MPIA as a staff member in the Galaxies and Cosmology department. He had previously won the Max Planck Society's Otto Hahn Medal for outstanding achievements during the PhD phase in 2015 and the Carnegie Institution's Thacher award in 2017.