The first Vietnamese to win Taiwan's international astronomy award

Associate Professor Dr. Hoang Chi Thiem, 45 years old, won the World Young Astronomer Lecture Award presented by Central University in Taiwan and Delta Electronics Corporation.

Associate Professor Thiem is currently working at the Korea Astronautical Science Institute and the Korea University of Science and Technology. He is the first Vietnamese and the fourth person working in Asia to win this award.

The NCU-DELTA Young Astronomer Lectureship Award is held annually, starting from 2012, for 1-2 scientists under 45 years old, regardless of nationality or ethnicity. The award is nominated, evaluated and selected by an international committee of leading scientists in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics.

Associate Professor Thiem in Korea in 2024. (Photo: NVCC).

Sharing with reporters from Korea, Associate Professor Thiem said he was surprised to receive the notice from the award council because he did not submit an application for the award. He said this was recognition from the award council and the scientific community for the achievements gained in nearly 20 years of research on the field of dust and cosmic magnetic fields by him and his colleagues. "This is a great motivation for me to continue exploring and researching in this field, contributing to clarifying the origin of stars, planets and life in the universe ," Associate Professor Thiem said.

The award committee assessed that Associate Professor Thiem has a deep academic background and rich research experience. He has made many outstanding achievements in the fields of cosmic dust, the birth of stars and the process of planet formation. His research has deepened the community's understanding of interstellar matter and the evolution of planetary systems in the universe, and has made important contributions to the study of the cosmic microwave background.

The research of Associate Professor Thiem and his colleagues has contributed to solving a major problem in astrophysics that has existed for nearly 70 years, which is the orientation of dust particles in the interstellar medium causing the polarization of light from distant stars. The group has successfully built a unified quantitative theory to describe and predict the orientation of dust particles in magnetic fields, based on the radiation torque and supermagnetic relaxation. From this theory, the group has developed a physical model to simulate the polarization of light due to the absorption and emission of dust.

The physics-based polarization models of dust developed by the team are now the basis for using polarization data obtained from the world's most modern telescopes such as ALMA, SMA, JCMT, SOFIA and Planck to study the role of magnetic fields and dust in the formation of stars, planets and galaxy evolution.

Recently, Associate Professor Thiem and his colleagues developed a new technique to measure three-dimensional magnetic fields by combining the unified orientation theory developed by the group with observational data, contributing to clarifying the role of magnetic fields in the formation of stars and planets. In particular, in 2019, the group discovered a new physical mechanism that causes the breakup of dust grains due to centrifugal force when they rotate extremely fast under the influence of radiation torque. This new mechanism was published in the prestigious journal Nature Astronomy. The research has helped answer questions about the evolution of matter in the strong radiation environment around stars, supernova explosions and supermassive black holes.

In October 2022, Associate Professor Thiem was also the first Vietnamese to receive the Science Award from the Korean Astronomical Society for his 10-year contributions to the industry . He was also recently honored by Tatler Asia magazine as one of the 100 most influential Vietnamese people in Asia in 2024. Associate Professor Thiem regularly returns to Vietnam to participate in academic activities and training for young people and students who love astronomy.

Associate Professor Hoang Chi Thiem is a senior researcher at the Korea Space and Astronomy Science Institute (KASI) and an Associate Professor at the Korea University of Science and Technology. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA in 2012, and was later awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and the Humboldt Foundation (Germany). His main research interests are dust and magnetic fields in the universe.

In July 2022, Associate Professor Thiem and two scientists, Dr. Nguyen Trong Hien (NASA, USA, group leader) and Dr. Nguyen Luong Quang (American University, in Paris, France) founded the Astrophysics Group (SAGI) . The group operates under the management of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research and Education IFIRSE, under ICISE (Quy Nhon, Binh Dinh), where Professor Tran Thanh Van presided over the construction with the desire to become a common home for scientists. SAGI was established with the goal of contributing to the development of astrophysics in Vietnam.