- Topics
Professor Mareki Honma, Director of Mizusawa VLBI Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon
It has been announced that Professor Mareki Honma will receive the Medal with Purple Ribbon in the Autumn 2026 Honors.
Professor Honma has made longstanding contributions to observational astronomy based on the technology for Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). At the VERA (VLBI Exploration of Radio Astrometry) project, operated primarily by the Mizusawa VLBI Observatory of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), he played a central role from the construction phase onward, including evaluation of the system’s scientific performance. He contributed to the realization of Galactic-scale distance measurements through the world’s first simultaneous dual-beam receiving system. He also led efforts to determine the fundamental properties of the Milky Way, including the distance from the Solar System to the Galactic Center and the Galaxy’s rotation velocity.
In the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, an international collaboration that combined radio telescopes around the world to image the shadow of a black hole, Professor Honma served as Japan’s representative and contributed over the course of many years to bring the project to fruition. Through international collaboration, he participated in the development of instrumentation necessary to incorporate one of the EHT observing stations, namely the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in whose construction and operation NAOJ is involved. Incorporating ALMA as an EHT observing station helped make black hole observations possible. Furthermore, a Japanese research group proposed a new imaging analysis method for black hole observations. This method was adopted as one of the three approaches used to obtain the EHT’s initial imaging results and made a major contribution to the historic first-ever image of a black hole’s shadow.
In recognition of these achievements, Professor Honma has received numerous awards, including the Young Researcher Award of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (2014, individual award), the PASJ Excellent Paper Award (2015, as first author), the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award for Science and Technology (Research Category) (2017, jointly awarded to three researchers, as lead recipient), the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics awarded by the Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation (November 2019, jointly awarded as a member of the EHT collaboration), the Hayashi Chushiro Prize of the Astronomical Society of Japan (March 2021, individual award), and the Nishina Memorial Prize from the Nishina Memorial Foundation (December 2025, individual award).
Commenting on the honor, Professor Honma says,:
“Receiving this award is a tremendous honor as a researcher and a source of immense personal joy. The research recognized by this award was carried out through the cooperation of many collaborators. I would like to express my sincere gratitude once again to the staff of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, my colleagues around the world, and everyone who has supported me throughout my career. Encouraged by this recognition, I will continue to devote myself to my research.”
