DATE2023.02.09 #Awards & Prizes

Department of Astronomy doctoral course student Daisuke Taniguchi wins the 13th (2022) JSPS Ikushi Prize

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

Daisuke Taniguchi

Daisuke Taniguchi, a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Astronomy, has been awarded the JSPS Ikushi Prize for 2022. This award is given annually to less than 20 promising graduate students in all research fields, and it is a great honor for young researchers to receive the award.

The title of the award-winning research is "Exploring Red Supergiant Stars: Time Variability, Evolutionary Pathways, and Applications to the Study of the Milky Way Galaxy." Red supergiants are among the brightest and reddest stars and have a complex atmospheric structure that has a significant impact on the evolution of the galaxy and the universe, Despite their great impact on the evolution of the galaxy and the universe, their complex atmospheric structure has left them as a missing piece of the stellar puzzle that is not fully understood.

Taniguchi has established an original method to derive the temperature of red supergiants with high confidence using high-dispersion infrared spectroscopic data, and has laid the foundation for quantitative verification of evolutionary models of red supergiants. He also had the novel idea of using a meteorological satellite to study the luminosity of the most famous red supergiant star, Betelgeuse, over a long period of time without interruption, and revealed the reason for the large changes in luminosity that had been a mystery in this object. His development and pioneering of a wide range of new measurement methods for red supergiants is a major contribution to the field.

Dr. Taniguchi is also a graduate of the "Galaxy School," an annual outreach program for high school students held at Kiso Observatory. We are very pleased that such a graduate student of Department of Astronomy has achieved outstanding results and received high recognition both in Japan and abroad, and we congratulate her from the bottom of our hearts.

JSPS Ikushi Prize
https://www.jsps.go.jp/j-ikushi-prize/

(Responsibility: Associate Professor Naoto Kobayashi, Institute of Astronomy Kiso Observatory)