Bruce Elmegreen Awarded ASP's 2021 Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal

This post is adapted from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's website:

On 24 August the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) announced the 2021 recipient of its most prestigious award, the Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal: AAS member Bruce Elmegreen (Thomas J. Watson Research Center, IBM Research Division), in recognition of his pioneering work on dynamical processes of star formation.

After four decades of innovative research, Elmegreen has fundamentally changed our understanding of star formation. He studied widespread hierarchical structure in young stellar regions, discovered that star formation is rapid following turbulent compression and gravitational collapse of these regions, explained the formation of stellar clusters, and discovered the largest scales for these processes in galaxies beyond our own, spanning a wide range of cosmic time.

Elmegreen was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and received a BS in physics and astronomy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He earned his PhD at Princeton University under the guidance of Lyman Spitzer Jr. (1973 Bruce Medal awardee, 1973), studying the ionization of the local interstellar medium. His interests turned to interstellar dynamics as Junior Fellow at Harvard University, where, together with a colleague, he proposed that ionization from one generation of stars can compress residual gas and form another generation. He followed that with observations of interstellar filaments as further evidence for triggered collapse and proposed the same process on the scale of spiral arms. General observations and acceptance of these ideas would take several decades.

After six years on the faculty of Columbia University in New York, Elmegreen moved to IBM Research in 1984, where he began studies of galactic spirals, making the first digitized color images of galaxies and examining their symmetries to find spiral modes. He proposed that interstellar compression from turbulence produces a hierarchy in space and time for young stellar structures, with bound clusters forming in the densest parts of the hierarchy. Elmegreen also found that star clusters closer together in space have more similar ages in a pattern reflecting turbulent motions, and that star formation is relatively rapid on all scales. His work produced a major change in the prevailing model of star formation which was thought to operate at a much slower rate.

Established by Catherine Wolfe Bruce, an American philanthropist and patroness of astronomy, the ASP's highest award is given annually to a professional astronomer in recognition of a lifetime of outstanding achievement and contributions to astrophysics research. The medal has gone to some of the greatest astronomers of the past century and was first awarded in 1898 to Simon Newcomb. Previous recipients of the Bruce Medal include Giovanni V. Schiaparelli (1902), Edwin Hubble (1938), Fred Hoyle (1970), and Vera Rubin (2003).

For more information, see the ASP's Bruce Medal page.

Additional ASP Prize Recipients

• 2020 Robert J. Trumpler Award for a recent PhD thesis considered unusually important to astronomy: Gudmundur Kari Stefansson (PhD 2019, "Extreme Precision Photometry and Radial Velocimetry from the Ground," Pennsylvania State University).
• 2021 Trumpler Award: Jane Huang (PhD 2020, "Rings and Spirals in Protoplanetary Disks: The ALMA View of Planet Formation,” Harvard University).
• 2021 Thomas J. Brennan Award for exceptional achievement related to the teaching of astronomy at the high-school level: Christine Hirst Bernhardt (US National Astronomy Education Coordinator, IAU Office of Astronomy for Education).
• 2021 Klumpke-Roberts Award for outstanding contributions to the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy: Lars Lindberg Christensen (Head of Communications, Education, and Engagement, NSF's NOIRLab).