Violeta Gámez Rosas, a postdoctoral researcher at the IFPA Laboratory (Fundamental Interactions in Physics and Astrophysics) at the University of Liège, has just been awarded the 2026 Chesneau Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the field of high-angular-resolution astronomy. This prize recognises her doctoral thesis, which focused on unprecedented observations at the heart of an active galactic nucleus.
T
he Chesneau Prize is awarded every two years by the J.-L. Lagrange Laboratory at the Côte d’Azur Observatory and the ESO (European Southern Observatory), in honour of the astronomer Olivier Chesneau. Since 2015, it has recognised the best doctoral thesis in the field of high-angular-resolution optical astronomy, thereby acknowledging the work of young researchers who have made an exceptional contribution to this cutting-edge scientific field. The award comes with a prize of €1,000 and an invitation to present her work at ESO’s headquarters in Garching, Germany.
Violeta Gámez Rosas receives this prize for her pioneering observations of the active galactic nucleus NGC 1068 (also known as Messier 77), carried out as part of her PhD thesis at Leiden University. By combining three of the world’s most powerful instruments (VLTI/MATISSE, VLTI/GRAVITY and ALMA), she has produced leading-edge astrophysical results on this iconic galaxy, notably the first thermal imaging of the dust obscuring the supermassive black hole at its centre, published in the journal Nature in 2022 (1).
Violeta Gámez Rosas’s work addresses a central theme in contemporary astrophysics: understanding the structure and physics of active galactic nuclei, those extraordinarily luminous regions fuelled by supermassive black holes in the midst of accretion. The galaxy NGC 1068, one of the most studied of its kind, provides an ideal natural laboratory for probing these mechanisms at very high resolution.
(1) Gámez Rosas, V. et al., Thermal imaging of dust hiding the black hole in NGC 1068, Nature, 602, 403–407 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04311-7
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