Home  ›  News  ›  Farinella Prize 2024 Awarded to Ravit Helled

Farinella Prize 2024 Awarded to Ravit Helled

NCCR PlanetS member Prof. Ravit Helled, of the University of Zurich in Switzerland, has been awarded the 2024 Paolo Farinella Prize for her outstanding contributions to research into ‘the internal structure of planetary bodies: clues on formation processes of the Solar System’. The award ceremony took place on the first day of the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2024 in Berlin (8-13 September 2024) and was followed by a prize lecture by Prof. Helled.

The annual prize was established in 2010 to honour the memory of the Italian scientist Paolo Farinella (1953-2000). Each year, the prize acknowledges an outstanding researcher not older than 47 years (the age of Prof Farinella when he passed away) who has achieved important results in one of Prof Farinella’s fields of work. Each edition of the prize focuses on a different research area and, in 2024, the topic covered theoretical, modelling, experimental and observational work on the internal structure of Solar System bodies, including planets, moons and small bodies. The award is supported by the Europlanet Society.

Prof. Helled’s research deals with the formation of gaseous-rich planets inside and outside the Solar System. Her research on planetary interiors aims to determine the composition and internal structures of planets. She proposed that the cores of giant planets, which are enriched with heavy elements, might not be distinct from the rest of the deep interior region. This idea that cores are dilute or fuzzy, with some hydrogen and helium contained in the core and a gradual heavy-element structure extending into the deep interior, has since been confirmed by mission data.

Adriano Campo Bagatin, of the University of Alicante in Spain, said on behalf of the Paolo Farinella Prize Committee: “Ravit Helled has made first-order contributions to our understanding of giant planet formation, structure and evolution. She introduced the idea of dilute cores that was subsequently confirmed by Juno and Cassini measurements of Jupiter and Saturn. She has investigated different possible structures for gas giants and ice giants, both in this Solar System and elsewhere, and has shown how these structures are related to accretion processes. She has a strongly international perspective with involvement in both ESA and NASA spacecraft missions.”

Prof Helled obtained her Bachelor’s degree and PhD from the University of Tel Aviv. She joined the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Zurich in 2016 as Assistant Professor and has been Full Professor since 2023. She is a Co-Investigator on NASA’s Juno and ESA’s Juice missions, a Science Team Member of ESA’s Plato mission and the Interior Working Group Leader and a Consortium Member of ESA’s Ariel mission.

Prof Helled said on receiving the award: “I am very honored to receive the Farinella Prize. I am proud to be part of the planetary science community and thankful for doing research on a daily basis. I also thank my collaborators, students and postdocs who make the science journey so exciting and enjoyable.“

About the Paolo Farinella Prize

The Paolo Farinella Prize was established to honour the memory and the outstanding figure of Paolo Farinella (1953-2000), an extraordinary scientist and person. The prize is awarded in recognition of significant contributions given in the fields of interest of Farinella, which span from planetary sciences to space geodesy, fundamental physics, science popularisation, and security in space, weapons control and disarmament. The winner of the prize is selected each year on the basis of their overall research results in a chosen field. Candidates must participate in international and interdisciplinary collaborations, and be not older than 47 years, the age of Farinella when he passed away, at the date of 25 March 2000. The prize was first proposed during the ‘International Workshop on Paolo Farinella the scientist and the man’, held in Pisa in 2010 and supported by the University of Pisa, ISTI/CNR and by IAPS-INAF (Rome), and first awarded in 2011.

Previous Paolo Farinella Prize awardees include NCCR PlanetS member Martin Jutzi, co-winner of the prize in 2022 with Julie Castillo-Rogez for their work on Asteroids: Physics, Dynamics, Modelling and Observations.