Michael Kramer, Director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie ( MPIfR ) in Bonn, Germany, and Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics ( JBCA ), has received one of the prestigious Marcel Grossman Awards.
Prof Kramer was recognised at the latest Marcel Grossman meeting in Paris for his fundamental contributions to pulsar astrophysics, and notably for having first confirmed the existence of spin-orbit precession in binary pulsars.
The Marcel Grossmann Meetings were founded in 1975 by Remo Ruffini and Abdus Salam with the aim of reviewing developments in theoretical and experimental general relativity ( Einstein's theory of gravity ), gravitation, and relativistic field theories. They provide an international discussion forum for physicists and astronomers. They are organized at different locations and take place every three years.
According to Einstein's General Relativity the rotational axis of a pulsar moving in the gravitational field of a companion continuously changes its orientation ( geodetic precession ). Michael Kramer was able to detect such changes for the first time using radio observations of pulsar PSR B1913+16 ( the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor in 1993 for the discovery of this pulsar ) made with the Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany.
In the following years, Michael Kramer, working at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank, as part of an international team of astronomers, has used the newly-found double pulsar system, PSR J0737-3039, to conduct the best-ever tests of Einstein's Theory of Gravity for strong gravitational fields.
Michael Kramer obtained his PhD in 1995 with a study of pulsars and neutron stars at MPIfR. After his time as an MPG Otto-Hahn fellow at Berkeley, he returned to the MPIfR. In autumn 1999, he became a lecturer in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.
From 2005 he was head of the pulsar group at Jodrell Bank and since 2006 full professor of astrophysics at the University of Manchester. Since March 2009 he has held a joint position as Director of the MPIfR in Bonn and as Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Manchester.
Laureates from previous years include for example, John Archibald Wheeler ( 1988 ), Stephen Hawking ( 1991 ), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar ( 1994 ), Riccardo Giacconi ( 2000 ) and Joachim Trümper ( 2006 ). "It is a great honour to stand in line with such excellent scientists who have received the Marcel Grossmann Award before", says Michael Kramer.