Exeter Astrophysics expert Isabelle Baraffe awarded prestigious international award
Professor Isabelle Baraffe will be receiving the Viktor Ambartsumian International Science Prize alongside Prof. Alexander Szalay (John Hopkins University) and Prof. Adam Burrows (Princeton University) for her “fundamental contributions to the field of low mass stars, Brown dwarfs and exoplanets and for innovative ideas in the domains of asteroseismology and compact binaries”.
This prize is awarded by the Republic of Armenia and includes a cash award of US$ 200,000 and a further US$ 100,000 to be used in the further development of Astronomy and Astrophysics both in Armenia and outside. Prof. Baraffe has been researching at the University of Exeter for the last 10 years and is the Head of Astrophysics.
The Ambartsumian Prize adds a line to a long list of achievements and prices she has collected throughout her career. Prof. Baraffe is focused on the study of those physical processes that are characteristic of the formation, structure, and evolution of substellar objects. Specifically, her work researches brown dwarfs and low mass stars.
They refer to those objects that are not big enough to be stars because they do not fuse enough hydrogen in their cores, hence are cooling, and to those stars that have a lower pressure in their cores which allows them to live for a trillion years while fusing at a lower rate.
Prof. Baraffe will continue to produce knowledge and contribute to a better understanding of stellar and planetary astrophysics. In the meantime, she continues to be recognised for her research, an honour she wishes to share with collaborators, postdocs, and PhD students that have contributed to her research and share the award with them.
Editor: Elen Johnston
