♦ US-based Indian-origin astronomer Professor Shrinivas Kulkarni has clinched the Royal Astronomical Society's (RAS) prestigious Gold Medal in London for pioneering discoveries in time-domain astronomy. The award recognises his "field-defining" contributions to multi-wavelength transient astrophysics, marking him among luminaries like Stephen Hawking, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Albert Einstein, and Edwin Hubble.

♦ This highest honour from the 200-year-old organisation points to Kulkarni's transformative impact on observing fleeting cosmic events. As George Ellery Hale Professor at Caltech since 1985, Kulkarni unearthed brown dwarfs, remote gamma-ray bursts, and the first millisecond pulsar.

♦ In 1997, he proved gamma-ray bursts originate extragalactically, reshaping astrophysics. His leadership birthed the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) and Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), revolutionising optical time-domain surveys by capturing thousands of exploding stars, blinking novae, and other transients across the Northern sky every two nights from Palomar Observatory.

♦ The 2024 Shaw Prize winner, who earned his Master's from IIT Delhi in 1978 and PhD from Berkeley in 1983, now drives Nasa's UVEX ultraviolet sky survey (launch 2030) and Z-Shooter spectrometer for Keck Observatory (first light 2029).

♦ RAS Gold Medals, awarded annually since 1824 across astronomy and geophysics, celebrate diverse talents from research to outreach.