Ludwig Biermann Award 2019

For his work in the fast-growing field of the search for the earliest and most distant quasars in the universe, the German Astronomical Society honours Eduardo Bañados with the Ludwig Biermann Award. Already in his PhD thesis he developed a method to discover high redshift quasars that resulted in almost doubling the number of the highest redshift quasars previously known. One of his greatest achievements is the discovery of the most distant quasar at a redshift equivalent to the age of the universe of only 700 million years. The study of high-redshift quasars is fundamental to the understanding of galaxy and structure formation in the universe. Due to their enormous brightness, quasars probe the early universe and allow conclusions about the masses of their central black holes. After completing his doctorate, Eduardo Bañados had a postdoctoral position as a Carnegie-Princeton fellow, a prestigious joint fellowship between Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena California and Princeton University in New Jersey, and returned to the  Max Planck Institute for Astronomy Heidelberg in 2019.

The Ludwig Biermann Award by the German Astronomical Society is awarded in recognition of outstanding young astronomers. The award consists of financing a scientific stay at an institution of the recipient's choice.