Tycho Brahe prize awarded to Göran Scharmer

Left: Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope (SST) on La Palma. Credit: Dan Kiselman. Right: Göran Scharmer. Credit: Staffan Larsson.

The Swedish solar researcher Göran Scharmer is awarded newly created prize by the European Astronomical Society (EAS).

The newly created Tycho Brahe prize will be awarded annually in recognition of the development or exploitation of European instruments, or major discoveries based largely on such instruments. Göran Scharmer, professor at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' Institute for Solar Physics, is the first laureate, thanks to his great contributions to advancing ground-based solar observations. The Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope (SST), for which Göran Scharmer had a leading role in the development, is currently the world's best solar telescope and is situated on La Palma, one of the Canary Islands. The telescope has been used to take the sharpest images ever of the solar surface and in this way completely new knowledge about sun spots, faculae and the solar atmosphere has been obtained.

The prize will be awarded to Göran Scharmer in September at the opening ceremony of the next European JENAM meeting (Joint European and National Astronomy Meeting) in Vienna, Austria. For more information, see the EAS press release.