Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society

History

The RAS was founded in 1820 and the first Gold Medals were awarded in 1824. Silver medals were also awarded in 1824 and 1827, but that practice was quickly abandoned, instead the RAS established other awards.

In the early years, the RAS Council sometimes decided that there were no suitable nominations that merited the award of the gold medal. There are therefore 17 years without an award, the most recent being 1942 - on that occasion due to the disruption of the Second World War. In the early years, more than one medal was often awarded in a year, but by 1833 only one medal was being awarded per year. This remained the usual practice for over a century, although two medals were awarded in both 1867 and 1886. To ensure balance in research areas, in 1964 the award was expanded to two medals per year, one in astronomy (including astrophysics, cosmology etc.) and one in geophysics (including planetary science, tectonics etc.), which remains the current system.

The first woman to receive the Gold Medal was Caroline Herschel in 1828. No other woman received the award until Vera Rubin in 1996. Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge were jointly awarded the 2005 Gold Medal in astronomy, the first joint award since 1886.

Discovery of Neptune

From 1833 the RAS only awarded one medal per year, which was enforced by a bye-law. This caused a controversy when Neptune was discovered in 1846. The astronomers Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams had both independently predicted the existence of the planet and calculated its possible positions. The actual observation was by Johann Gottfried Galle, who was working from Le Verrier's prediction.

Le Verrier, Adams and Galle were all nominated for the RAS gold medal by the deadline in November 1846. At that time, Le Verrier was the only one to have formally published his results, so he was selected as the strongest nominee. Adams publicly acknowledged that Le Verrier had priority. However, by the time of the confirmatory vote in January 1847, Adams' publication had also been communicated to the council. Many members felt that the award should be made jointly to both Adams and Le Verrier, but this was prohibited by the bye-law. The Council did not reach the required 3:1 super-majority to confirm Le Verrier's medal, so none was awarded in 1847.

A special general meeting of the fellows was called to consider suspending the bye-law, but declined to do so. By the following nomination deadline, both Le Verrier and Adams had been nominated again, and there was still no way to honour both without violating the bye-law. The controversy was resolved by giving 12 "testimonial" awards (not gold medals) in 1848 to everyone who had been nominated, which included Adams, Le Verrier, several members of the council, and two previous winners of the gold medal. Galle was not included, and never received an award from the RAS. Seventy years later, Ralph Allan Sampson described this fudged decision as "prematurely awarding some and unnecessarily rewarding others ... offending against good taste ... and depleting future years of many of their best candidates".

Gold medal awards resumed in 1849, with the limit of one per year. Adams and Le Verrier were not given gold medals until 1866 and 1868, respectively, officially for work unrelated to the discovery of Neptune. Adams, who was then President of the RAS, presented Le Verrier with the medal.

General relativity

In 1919, Arthur Eddington led an expedition to observe the solar eclipse on 29 May. The photographs taken during that event confirmed Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity; Eddington presented his results at a special joint meeting of the RAS and the Royal Society in November 1919. The RAS also devoted their December 1919 meeting to discussion of general relativity. Einstein immediately became the leading candidate for the 2020 RAS Gold Medal.

At that time, RAS Council selected the strongest nominations at its December meeting, which required a simple majority vote. A second vote would then be held in January to confirm that the medal should be awarded, which required a three-quarters super-majority; normally this was a formality. Einstein was nominated by H. H. Turner, seconded by James Jeans, and at the December meeting Council voted that Einstein was the strongest candidate. However, some members of Council felt it would be politically inappropriate to award the medal to a German citizen (Einstein then held German and Swiss joint citizenship), because Britain was still technically engaged in the First World War against Germany (the Treaty of Versailles did not enter into force until 10 January 1920). At the January meeting, Council did not confirm the award. Turner and Jeans were both Council members and had been present at the December meeting, but not in January; their absence may have swayed the outcome.

As a result, no gold medal was awarded in 1920. Embarrassingly, after the December vote Eddington had already passed a message to Einstein, stating that he would receive the medal. Eddington had to write an apologetic letter to Einstein informing him that the medal had been withdrawn. Einstein was again nominated for the 1921 medal, but Council decided that the issue was still too controversial so awarded the medal to Henry Norris Russell instead. Einstein does not appear to have been too offended by the affair, because he attended the June 1921 meeting of the RAS where he delivered a lecture on general relativity. He did not receive his gold medal until 1926, when the political situation had stabilised and the composition of Council had changed. Eddington received his own gold medal in 1924, before Einstein, in part for his work in confirming general relativity.

Recipients