Researcher awarded for bringing us out of the dark

Professor Ken Freeman from the Australian National University has been awarded the Australian Academy of Science’s highest honour for research in the physical sciences - the Matthew Flinders Medal.

The award was presented to Professor Freeman during the academy’s annual event ‘Science at the Shine Dome’ for his work in the field of astronomy studying dark matter in galaxies.

“The nature of dark matter remains one of the great problems of contemporary astrophysics,” Professor Freeman said.

“In large galaxies like our Milky Way, only about 5% of the mass is in the form of visible stars and gas. The remaining 95% is made up of dark matter that doesn’t give off any known radiation; it is detectable only through its gravitational field and is otherwise invisible.

“Depending on the nature of dark matter, there is a faint hope it might give off some detectable gamma rays as the dark matter particles annihilate.”

In the 1970s, Professor Freeman was one of the first scientists to point out that spiral galaxies contained a large fraction of dark matter and has continued to study the density of dark matter in dwarf galaxies, as well as the formation and dynamics of the Milky Way.

The Matthew Flinders Medal will go alongside Professor Freeman’s other accolades, including the Dannie Heineman prize of the American Institute of Physics and the American Astronomical Society (1999), the Prime Minister’s Science Prize (2012) and the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society.

He has been a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science since 1981 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London since 1998.

Professor Freeman and other awardees presented their work at the Australian Academy of Science’s Shine Dome today. The full list of award winners is available at www.science.org.au/events/sats/sats2013/awards.html.