The Ministry's newly established prize - the Into Change Award - is this year being presented to the international astrophysics consortium ENGRAVE, in which Senior Researcher Giorgos Leloudas and PhD student Hannah Wichern from DTU Space are active members.
With the award, the ministry wishes to celebrate European values and excellence in research.
The two DTU scientists and ENGRAVE are being honoured for their contributions to understanding how the universe's heaviest elements - such as gold, uranium and platinum - are formed. This happens in connection with the collision between two neutron stars, or between a neutron star and a black hole. Such an event is called a kilonova explosion.
"This is a crucial clue in the mapping of our cosmic origins," says Giorgos Leloudas, who is a coordinator in one of ENGRAVE's working groups.
"Our team at DTU Space has contributed to the research in ENGRAVE for several years, and we are pleased to be among the recipients of the first Into Change Award".
Leloudas has contributed to several of the key scientific papers for which ENGRAVE is receiving the prize.
Researchers from the University of Copenhagen play a prominent role in the collaboration and are also receiving the award. The ENGRAVE collaboration includes around 250 researchers at universities and research institutions in several mainly European countries.
The research in ENGRAVE is based on observations from a number of telescopes on Earth and in space, including the ground-based VLT telescope in Chile and the James Webb Space Telescope, to which DTU Space has supplied equipment.
The prize includes DKK 8 million for the ENGRAVE consortium and is supported economically by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, Carlsberg Foundation, and Villum Foundation. It will be awarded on 15 December at the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen.
The ENGRAVE collaboration
ENGRAVE (Electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave sources at the Very Large Telescope) was formed on the basis of a major discovery made in 2017. At that time, an international research effort led by a network of scientists and observatories across 13 European countries, demonstrated for the first time that heavy elements - such as gold, uranium and platinum - are produced in large quantities when two neutron stars collide or when a neutron star and a black hole collide.
The researchers had observed a specific event of this kind, known as GW170817.
ENGRAVE was subsequently established in 2018 to bring together astronomers, physicists and cosmologists in a joint effort to further study these extreme collisions.
