SRG All Sky Survey — IKI, MPE (Sunyaev, Churazov, Gilfanov, Merloni, Brunner, Sanders)

The X-ray RGB map of the sky obtained by the SRG/eROSITA telescope.

2021 Marcel Grossmann Awards Announced

The Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) orbital X-ray observatory and its associated institutions and industrial partners received the 2021 Marcel Grossmann Institutional Award. The international collaboration is cited for the following achievements:

“…creation of the world's best X-ray map of the entire sky, for the discovery of millions of previously unknown accreting supermassive black holes at cosmological redshifts, for the detection of X-rays from tens of thousands of galaxy clusters, filled mainly with dark matter, and for permitting the detailed investigation of the growth of the largescale structure of the universe during the era of dark energy dominance.”

The Institutional Award was presented to Rashid Sunyaev, Maureen and John Hendricks Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences and Principal Investigator of the SRG Observatory in Russia. He accepted the award on behalf of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which “was responsible for developing the overall concept and scientific program of the SRG Orbital observatory and played a leading role in developing the ART-XC telescope and the entire SRG observatory as part of the Russian space science program carried out by Roskosmos Corporation in the interests of the Russian Academy of Sciences.”

The Institutional Award was also shared by S. A. Lavochkin Association (presented to Designer General Alexander Shirshakov) and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (presented to Peter Predehl, Principal Investigator of eROSITA).

In past years, the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Hubble Space Telescope; the PLANCK Cosmological Satellite team; and the European Space Agency have received the Institutional Award.

The 2021 Marcel Grossmann Individual Award, which recognizes the contributions to science of many world-renowned mathematicians, physicists, and astrophysicists, was awarded to School of Mathematics Visitor and Member Demetrios Christodoulou (1983; 1984), School of Natural Sciences Visitor Gerard t’Hooft (1973), Member Tsvi Piran (1980; 1982–87), and Steven Weinberg.

The awards were announced on July 5, 2021, during the 16th Marcel Grossmann Meeting hosted online by the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics (ICRA).