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David Sanders, University of Hawaii professor of physics and astronomy, has received the prestigious Humboldt Research Award for U.S. scientists for his accomplishments in research and teaching. UH prof awarded for
teaching, researchStar-Bulletin staff
He is internationally known for his work on quasars, which he has found are most likely formed when two giant, gas-rich galaxies merge.
Sanders, who is also associate director for research support in the Institute of Astronomy, was selected for the award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The foundation grants about 50 awards annually to researchers internationally in all scientific fields.
He received a monetary prize and was invited to conduct a research program in Germany as a Humboldt Professor.
The professor will spend two months a year at the Max-Planck-Institut furer Extraterrestrische Physik in Garching, Germany, through 2002.
He said he will collaborate with scientists in Garching in preparing proposals to use NASA's Space Infrared Telescope Facility, planned for launch soon.
Sanders has worked with data from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite to investigate the origin of quasars -- a study he began in the late 1980s at the California Institute of Technology.
He has expanded on his research at the Institute for Astronomy while working with graduate students and postdoctoral researchers and telescopes on Mauna Kea.
How galaxies form "is an extremely hot topic in extragalactic research and of great interest to the general public," he said.
"Our own Milky Way galaxy and its nearest big neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, will one day -- some 5 billion years in the future -- merge."
Sanders said this "will build and fuel a massive black hole in their common merger nucleus. Accretion of matter falling onto the black hole could be sufficient to provide the enormous power that is characteristic of quasars."