The award ceremony for the 14th "La Recherche" prize took place at the Paris-Dauphine University, during the "Think Education & Research" event organized by News Tank.
Pierre Kervella was recompensed for his research published in February 2017 on Proxima and Alpha Centauris the closest stellar system to our solar system, just over 40 000 billion km from the Earth.
Situated at the Laboratoire d’études spatiales et d’instrumentation en astrophysique (Laboratory for space studies and instrumentation in astrophysics, Observatoire de Paris / CNRS / Université Pierre et Marie Curie / Université Diderot) and at the Unité Mixte Internationale LFCA of the CNRS, his team consisting of Frédéric Thévenin (Observatory of the Côte d’Azur) and Christophe Lovis (University of Geneva) established extremely accurately the path of the star Proxima Centauris.
They showed that the star, the closest one to the Sun, is linked gravitationally to its two neighbors Alpha Centauris A and « B ». In other words, Proxima is in orbit around Alpha Centauris. Thus our closest neighbor is in fact a triple star. Thus has been solved a question that arose since the discovery of Proxima Centauri in 1915.
The "La Recherche" prizes are awarded each year for the best works published in French and figuring in 12 references (with one specifically highlighted).
The laureates were selected by a jury of experts and journalists from the magazine "La Recherche", presided by Yann LeCun, director of Facebook’s artificial intelligence laboratory, and incumbent holder in 2016 of the professorship "Information technology and computer science" at the Collège de France.