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Rashid Sunyaev receives German Federal Cross of Merit
End of June, the Bavarian Minister for Science, Research and Art,
Dr. Wolfgang Heubisch, presented Rashid Sunyaev, Director at the Max
Planck Institute for Astrophysics with the German Federal Order of
Merit on ribbon for his fundamental contributions to cosmology and
astrophysics. In his honorific speech, Dr. Heubisch highlighted
Sunyaev’s scientific achievements, awards and membership in many
renowned science academies worldwide. In particular he mentioned that
in the end of the 1980s, Sunyaev was head of the international team
transforming the research module ”KVANT“ on the Russian
space station MIR into a X-ray observatory.
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Fig.:
Energy spectrum of the hard X-rays observed from the supernova SN 87A
(squares, crosses and diamonds). The histograms show the results of
Monte Carlo simulations of the envelope 180 and 210 days after the
explosion. (From the original publication in Nature, 19 November 1987,
Vol 330, p227)
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In 1987, the two X-Ray detectors in the KVANT module, the HEXE hard
X-Ray detector developed at the Max Planck Institute for
Extraterrestrial Physics and the Russian hard X-Ray detector
Pulsar-X1, detected a strong signal from the well-known supernova SN
87A in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The analysis of the data showed
that high energy gamma-rays from the radioactive decay of Co-56 were
scattered multiple times in the optically thick envelope, resulting in
an unusually hard X-Ray spectrum. Moreover the scientists found that
this envelope was already strongly mixed — only a few months
after the explosion.
The MIR-KVANT X-Ray observatory discovered many other astronomical
sources, including black hole transients and rapidly rotating neutron
stars. ”This was an excellent example of scientific cooperation
between the Soviet Union and Germany in space,“ says Rashid
Sunyaev, ”and we hope that this will continue in the framework
of the Russian Spectrum-X mission with the German eRosita telescope
aboard.“
A colleague of Sunyaev’s, Prof. Stephan Paul from the Excellence
Cluster Universe and the Technical University Munich was honoured
likewise with the Federal Order of Merit the same day.
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