Flash drive

Space isn't just an endless canvas to be studied at leisure; there is real-time change we'll miss if we aren't looking for it, says astronomer Kulkarni. Over decades, he has changed how his peers view the heavens. His 'field-defining' work just won him the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal. Unusually, Kulkarni switches areas of focus every few years. 'I'm not aiming for a Nobel,' he says, smiling. 'A life of discovery... what more can one want?'

- Snehal Fernandes

He likes to joke that his initials are SRK, but he hobnobs with a very different set of stars.

Astronomer Shrinivas Ramchandra Kulkarni, 69, loves bunnies, is mercilessly irreverent, and switches focus areas every five years. "I like to identify emerging fields, make a splash and then exit, once the field has become popular," he says.

It's an unusual approach, but one that's served him well. Kulkarni, who teaches astronomy and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), won the $1.2 million Shaw Prize in Astronomy (instituted by Hong Kong businessman Run Run Shaw and known as the Nobel of the East) in 2024, and followed that up, this January, with the highest award handed out by UK's Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), its Gold Medal.

Kulkarni's area of specialisation is time-domain astronomy, or the study of real-time change in the universe. What does this mean?

Rather than just an endless canvas to be studied at leisure, he and others like him argue that the universe is also a bit like a bowl of popcorn in the microwave.

Dramatic changes are occurring on all sorts of timescales, from seconds to years, and are visible, if one is watching for them, and knows where to look.

Kulkarni has helped define what to look for, and where, in ways that the RAS citation calls "field-defining... innovative and groundbreaking".

For an indication of how complex this work is, consider that, even with popcorn, one would have to figure out which kernels to focus on, in what order, and how much information to record before moving on to the next one about to pop.

In astrophysics, the "kernels" consists of things like pulsars and gamma-ray bursts that cannot be seen; only sensed by certain space telescopes. And are gone in a flash.