Royal Astronomical Society Honours the SAURON Team with the Group Achievement Award 2013 – MPIA Scientists Involved
A few days ago at the UK National Astronomy Meeting in St. Andrews, the Royal Astronomical Society presented its Group Achievement Award to the SAURON team, including MPIA scientists Dr. Remco van den Bosch and Dr. Glenn van de Ven.
This prize honours research groups that have made outstanding contributions to astronomy and which are distinguished by excellent teamwork, project strategy and project organization.
SAURON stands for Spectrographic Areal Unit for Research on Optical Nebulae and refers to an integral field spectrograph which operates at the 4.2-meter William Herschel Telescope on La Palma (Spain). The instrument allows "imaging spectroscopy", that is, simultaneous measurement of individual spectra over a panoramic field of view. These spectra, which spread the input light into its individual wavelength components, allowed the SAURON team to perform a detailed analysis of the kinematics and stellar composition of 72 carefully selected nearby galaxies. The study was particularly targeted at understanding the formation and evolution of elliptical galaxies.
Further Informationen about the project und all involved scientists:
Press Release of the European Southern Observatory ESO
http://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann13060/
Web information of the Royal Astronomical Society RAS
http://www.ras.org.uk/awards-and-grants/awards/2210-winners-of-the-2013-awards-medals-and-prizes