Professor Satoshi Miyazaki, Director of Subaru Telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), has received the Japan Academy Prize. He and his collaborator, Professor Masamune Oguri of the Center for Frontier Science, Chiba University, jointly received the prize for their work, “Pioneering and Promoting Cosmology Research Using Gravitational Lensing Effects.”

Revealing the true nature of dark matter and dark energy is a major topic for physics and cosmology in the 21st century. Professor Miyazaki has developed Hyper Suprime-Cam, an ultra-wide-field prime focus camera for the Subaru Telescope, and led a large-scale observation program to precisely observe the distribution of dark matter, as well as to prepare and publish the image data. He opened new avenues for research by demonstrating that the distribution of dark matter can be determined from the analysis of faint distortions in the images of background galaxies caused by the gravitational lensing effect of the intervening dark matter. Professor Oguri also made many important contributions, including deciphering the three-dimensional spatial distribution of dark matter and its temporal evolution over billions of years from these large-scale observational data.

Both winners were honored for their research, which has led to a new expansion in the study of dark matter.