 "Photo: Austin Larson")
Everyone looks up at the sky and wonders what's out there. Lennox Cowie wins awards for it.
Cowie, who has worked at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's Institute for Astronomy for the past 25 years, won the 2009 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics. The prize is awarded to an astronomer in the prime of his career, who has displayed outstanding work in the field of astronomy or astrophysics.
"The list is a nice one to be on because it's people whose work is important in the field and whose work you admire and respect," said Cowie.
A Harvard-educated theoretical physicist, Cowie won the award for his surveys of star and galaxy formations that developed as a result of the Big Bang.
"Up until about 20 years ago we didn't know an awful lot about first generation star formations, or when or where the star formations took place or how galaxies formed," Cowie said. "So it's a substantial piece of work over the last couple of decades to try and find these first galaxies, and to try to understand the star formations that actually took place."
Cowie, whose resume includes research stints at Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said there weren't many scientists studying galaxy evolution when he began his research, but the topic has become increasingly popular among astronomers.
"It's a very intense subject at this point," Cowie said.
The Heineman Prize for Astrophysics is a joint prize administered by the American Astronomical Society and American Institute for Physics. Steve Maran, an astronomer and press officer for the American Astronomical Society, said that to win the award, a person first has to be nominated by one of the 7,000 members of the organization.
"That's roughly half of all professional astronomers in the world," Maran said.
The nominations are then reviewed by the six-member Heineman Prize for Astrophysics committee, who selects a winner.
Kimberly Weaver, a program scientist for NASA and a member of the committee, said in an e-mail that the "deliberations of the committee are confidential and are only reported to the American Astronomical Society and American Institute for Physics."
Cowie said that some of the tools his team uses are the Hubble spacecraft telescope and the telescopes on Mauna Kea. When he first started working at UH, Cowie used to travel to the observatory at the summit of Mauna Kea, but now astronomers can communicate with the people who control the telescopes and watch from computers.
"It's not that easy to think clearly. The mind tends to get a little blurry," Cowie said of not having to travel. "It's much easier when you can do a better job that's much more observant."
A new instrument, the SCUBA 2, should allow his team to uncover some hidden star formations within two or three years, according to Cowie.
"We're going to head off and chase after these things for a while," he said.
In addition to the Heineman Prize, Cowie was also awarded the UH Regents' Medal for Excellence in 1998. In 2004 he became a fellow in the 350-year-old Royal Society of the United Kingdom. The Royal Society only selects about 30 fellows each year, according to Cowie.
The astronomer will be honored in January at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. As part of the prize, he has the opportunity to give a lecture, which he said he'll accept.
Cowie said that while winning the award was a shock, he doesn't think it'll "change his life or anything."
"The Heineman is the one that you earn when you're still on some sort of trajectory, as opposed to in the end of your career," he said.
THE HEINEMAN PRIZE
The Heineman Prize is named after Dannie Heineman, a Belgian-American engineer and businessman. The Heineman Foundation was established in 1928 and was re-restablished in 1951 by Dannie Heineman's children. The Foundation's goal is to support both charitable and scientific institutions, and to foster research, training and cooperation in the scientific realm both in Germany and abroad, according to the Heineman Foundation's Web site.
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