Honolulu, HI – January 6, 2020 (1:00 PM EST) – The winners of the 2019 Buchalter Cosmology Prize were announced today at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, HI. The annual prize, created by Dr. Ari Buchalter in 2014, seeks to reward new ideas or discoveries that have the potential to produce a breakthrough advance in our understanding of the origin, structure, and evolution of the universe.
The $10,000 First Prize was awarded to Dr. Jahed Abedi of the Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut) and Leibniz Universität Hannover and Dr. Niayesh Afshordi of the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, for their work entitled “Echoes from the Abyss: A highly spinning black hole remnant for the binary neutron star merger GW170817”.
Dr. Jahed Abedi has received his PhD from Sharif University of Technology. He and Dr. Niayesh Afshordi, who has received his BSc. in Physics from Sharif University of Technology in 1999, submitted this paper before Abedi joins Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut) as a Postdoc researcher.
This paper was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics and recognized by the judging panel as “a bold and innovative step towards understanding quantum gravitational phenomena, using observational data to demonstrate gravitational wave echoes from a binary neutron star merger, which could indicate that black hole interiors may be more complex than the simple regions predicted by General Relativity.”