EAS Honors Martin Rees with Inaugural Fritz Zwicky Prize for Astrophysics & Cosmology

This post is adapted from a European Astronomical Society press release (PDF):

On behalf of the Fritz Zwicky Foundation in Glarus, Switzerland, the European Astronomical Society (EAS) has introduced the Fritz Zwicky Prize for Astrophysics & Cosmology to honor scientists who have obtained fundamental and outstanding results in these fields. It will be awarded biennially beginning in 2020. The Inaugural Fritz Zwicky Prize goes to honorary AAS member Prof. Martin J. Rees (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom) for outstanding contributions to astrophysics and cosmology including seminal papers on active galaxies and black holes, the origin of gamma-ray bursts, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the cosmic microwave background. This exceptionally broad oeuvre has been both prescient and enormously influential.

Martin Rees (Lord Rees of Ludlow, Astronomer Royal of England, past president of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity College) studied at Cambridge University, taking a BA in 1963 and PhD in 1967, the latter for work with Dennis Sciama on the physics of quasars and tests of the steady-state cosmology. After several research posts, and then a Chair at the University of Sussex, he was appointed Plumian Professor in Cambridge in 1973, a post he held until 1991. He has held visiting and professorial positions in London, Princeton, Sussex, Harvard, and Caltech, where he interacted collegially with Zwicky in Fritz's home and office during his visit to Caltech in 1971. Rees held, at last count, 25 honorary doctorates from universities around the world and honorary fellowships and awards in 13 countries. He has been a member of the Order of Merit since 2007. The most recent of his 10 books, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, is being translated into 16 languages.

Prof. Martin Rees has maintained a consistent flow of important papers, over an amazingly wide range of topics in astronomy and cosmology — especially in high-energy processes, compact objects, relativistic astrophysics, galactic evolution, and the emergence of structure in the expanding universe. He is widely admired for his physical insight, and many of his ideas have proved prescient, being vindicated by later observations, forming the basis for productive development by many others. He is primarily a theorist but has always maintained close interactions with observers in all wavebands. He has achieved his pervasive influence not only through his papers, but also through his students, postdocs, and extended international network of collaborators as well as his many lectures and reviews, both at scientific conferences and to more general public audiences. He has also, especially in the last two decades, had an important role in science policy and international collaborations.

Prof. Rees has been an influential contributor to our understanding of the nuclei of galaxies. Even in the 1960s, while still a student, he made predictions about "superluminal expansion" and other physical processes now recognized to be crucial to these phenomena. He originated key ideas about supermassive black holes, including how they form, generate collimated jets, and energize active galaxies, their multiphase gaseous environment, and their use as probes of relativistic gravity.

With colleagues and students, he has maintained a flow of original contributions to the study of compact objects. Early in his career, he helped delineate the now-standard scenario for X-ray binaries in terms of accretion onto compact objects. More recently, his focus has been on gamma-ray bursts, where he and his associates have injected several key ideas that have clarified how these enigmatic objects arise.

He has focused not only on the cores of galaxies, but also on the galaxies themselves, and wrote classic papers that related the characteristic sizes of galaxies to basic physics. He authored some key papers on cold dark matter (CDM) in the 1980s; later, he pioneered the exploration of CDM's implications for the first stars, high-redshift quasars, and the ionization and structure of the intergalactic medium. More than 40 years ago, he was already emphasizing the importance of exploring Population III stars and how the cosmic dark age ended.

In recent years there has been enormous growth in interest in the high-redshift universe. Prof. Rees has emphasized the role of molecules in early cooling, the role of successive mergers in the coordinated buildup of galaxies and massive black holes, and the use of gamma-ray bursts and supernovae to probe early epochs. He was the first to propose the possibility of cosmic tomography using the 21 cm line, a subject now attracting wide interest in the context of future radio astronomy projects. As a first-year postdoc in 1968, he wrote a prescient paper proposing that polarization measurements could elucidate the origin of fluctuations and anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Polarization of the CMB was first detected in 2002 and is now accepted as a key diagnostic for the physics of ultra-early eras. Another type of CMB fluctuation, the Rees-Sciama effect due to large nonlinear perturbations, was also proposed back in 1968 and is attracting renewed interest. He has also been associated with many key developments in understanding gamma-ray bursts. His pioneering 1988 paper on the tidal disruption of stars by massive black holes led to this topic being intensively studied, at least 60 such events having now been observed. In addition, Prof. Rees has written influential papers on large-scale clustering in the universe; cosmic magnetic fields and their origin; gravitational radiation; and cosmic strings, the idea of multiple universes, and the future of mankind itself.

Prof. Rees is one of the most highly cited researchers in his field. His influence on the contemporary development of astronomy and astrophysics — via informal discussions, correspondence, his wide travels, many lectures, and reviews is even greater than appears in the formal publication record.