{"id":55014,"date":"2017-01-13T10:33:23","date_gmt":"2017-01-13T20:33:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=55014"},"modified":"2020-01-22T14:06:55","modified_gmt":"2020-01-23T00:06:55","slug":"nick-kaiser-awarded-royal-astronomical-societys-highest-honor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2017\/01\/13\/nick-kaiser-awarded-royal-astronomical-societys-highest-honor\/","title":{"rendered":"Nick Kaiser awarded Royal Astronomical Society’s highest honor"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>
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Nick Kaiser<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nick Kaiser<\/strong><\/a>, an astronomer with the University of Hawaiʻi<\/span> at Mānoa’s Institute for Astronomy<\/a> has been awarded the gold medal in astronomy by the Royal Astronomical Society<\/a> (RAS). Kaiser will receive his award at the society’s national astronomy meeting in July.<\/p>\n

The gold medal is the Royal Astronomical Society’s highest honor and usually recognizes lifetime achievement. First awarded in 1824, the medal’s past recipients include Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Arthur Eddington and Stephen Hawking.<\/p>\n

Kaiser is receiving the award for his extensive theoretical and observational work on cosmology, including how matter—both dark and visible—is distributed on the largest scales. He was one of the pioneers in describing how this large-scale matter distribution bends light as it travels across the universe, a phenomenon known as weak gravitational lensing.<\/p>\n

His work has impacted many studies attempting to measure fundamental cosmological quantities such as the amount of dark matter and dark energy. Kaiser also conceived, and was the original principal investigator of, the Pan-STARRS<\/abbr> project, whose goals range from mapping the large-scale matter distribution in the Universe to detecting potentially hazardous asteroids. Pan-STARRS<\/abbr> recently released a huge trove of data to the public.<\/p>\n