Gilles Chabrier Receives the Royal Astronomical Society’s 2024 Gold Medal

Gilles Chabrier is an emeritus CNRS research director in the AstroENS team at CRAL (CNRS/ENS de Lyon/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) and a professor of astronomy at the University of Exeter.
Throughout his career, Gilles Chabrier has made exceptional contributions to our understanding of astrophysical plasma physics, exploring the nature of high-density environments inside white dwarfs, which led to the Segretain-Chabrier phase transition diagram.
His ambition was to better understand the conditions prevailing inside low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, giant planets, and the envelopes of white dwarfs and neutron stars, which is now possible thanks to the Saumon-Chabrier-Van Horn equation of state.
In the field of galactic astronomy, the galactic stellar and substellar initial mass function (IMF) he developed, the Chabrier IMF, has led to the first precise determination of the different contributions of stars, brown dwarfs, and stellar remnants to the galaxy’s mass balance.

Gilles Chabrier is widely recognized internationally; his work has already earned him the IOP’s Fred Hoyle Medal and Prize in 2019, the Ampère Prize from the French Academy of Sciences in 2014, the Eddington Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in 2011, the Jean Ricard Prize from the French Physical Society in 2010, and the CNRS Silver Medal in 2006.

For more information, see the ENS press release