The UK’s Royal Astronomical Society announced in February the winners of its awards and medals for 2004. The Gold Medal, the society’s highest honor, is awarded annually in two categories.

Winning this year’s Gold Medal in Astronomy is Jeremiah P. Ostriker, Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. He was honored as “one of the world’s most influential researchers in theoretical astrophysics.” Most astronomers before the early 1970s assumed that nearly all of the mass in galaxies resided in visible stars. However, Ostriker “was probably the most important single figure in convincing the astronomical community that this very natural assumption was wrong, “ says the citation. The new model for galaxies he proposed was “the grandest revision in our understanding of galaxies since the early 1900s … [and] has now largely been confirmed by observations.”

Grenville Turner, research professor at the University...

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