Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.
Daisuke Taniguchi Receives the 13th (FY2022) JSPS Ikushi Prize
Naoto Kobayashi
（Associate Professor, Institute of Astronomy)
Daisuke Taniguchi, a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Astronomy, has been awarded the JSPS Ikushi Prize for 2022. This prize is awarded annually to less than 20 promising graduate students in all research fields, and it is a great honor for young researchers to receive the prize.
Mr. Daisuke Taniguchi
The title of the award-winning research is "Exploration of Red Supergiant Stars: Time Variability, Evolutionary Pathways, and Application to the Study of the Milky Way Galaxy," and the subject of the research is "Red Supergiant Stars," which are among the brightest and reddest stars and have a significant impact on the evolution of the galaxy and the universe, yet they have a complex atmosphere structure that is not fully understood among stars. However, because of its complex atmospheric structure, it remains a missing piece among stars that is not well understood.
Taniguchi 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 clarified 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 "Galaxy School," an annual outreach program for high school students held at Kiso Observatory. We are very pleased to see such a graduate student of Department of Astronomy achieving excellent results and receiving high acclaim both in Japan and abroad, and we congratulate her from the bottom of our hearts.
Published in Faculty of Science News March 2023