The Astronomical Society of India has awarded Prof. Debra Elmegreen’s team (led by Indian astronomer Kanak Saha) its ASI New Discovery Award for 2020 for our research on ultraviolet light from a distant galaxy that Larry Hertz reported on in Sept. 2020.
The award note and citation are below.
The team led by Kanak Saha has been awarded the ASI New Discovery Award for the year 2020. The citation from the selection committee for the work is reproduced below.
“This research led by Kanak Saha reports the detection of Lyman continuum emission from a distant galaxy (z = 1.42) using the UVIT on-board AstroSat. Published in Nature Astronomy, the reported observations probe the middle of the redshift range where no detection has been made before making this an important discovery to bridge the gap in the Lyman continuum emission sources detected for z < 0.4 or for 2.5 < z < 3.5. In addition, this redshift range corresponds to an important epoch near the peak of the cosmic star formation history. This landmark observation, where EUV radiation is detected for the first time from a distant galaxy, throws open a window to probe and constrain the ionization spectrum and obtain crucial insight in observational cosmology to understand the nature of sources that produced the bulk of the ionizing radiation after the Cosmic Dark Age. Last but not the least, the results are based on observations with India’s Space Observatory, AstroSat.”
The award will formally be presented on the morning of Saturday, the 20th of February, 2021 at the inaugural session of the 39th meeting of the ASI, which will be held virtually this year.
