Supermassive black holes and gamma-ray bursts will be under discussion this week at a conference to celebrate the contribution of Professor Sir Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, to the field of theoretical astrophysics.

The conference, titled Making light of gravity, will be held at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, where Professor Rees is Royal Society Research Professor, and it will cover a range of challenging problems in cosmology.

Two public talks, given by Professor Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, and Professor Robert Kirshner, of Harvard University, will end the conference.

Professor Kirshner's talk, Wrestling reality - black holes, gamma ray bursts and the accelerating universe, will focus on the recent, exciting progress in observational cosmology, while Professor Hawking's talk, titled A brane new world, will outline the latest results in the theoretical realm.

Both talks will be held at the Lady Mitchell Hall, in Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, at 8pm on 12 July 2002.

Martin Rees is a Royal Society Research Professor and a fellow of King's College at the University of Cambridge. He holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal and is also Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at Leicester University.

He is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy, and several other foreign academies.

His awards include the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Balzan International Prize, the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the Heinemann Prize for Astrophysics (AAS/AIP), the Bower Award for Science of the Franklin Institute, and the Cosmology Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation.

He is the author or co-author of nearly 500 research papers, mainly on astrophysics and cosmology, as well as six books (four for general readership), and numerous magazine and newspaper articles on scientific and general subjects.


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