S&T's Govert Schilling Wins High-Energy Astrophysics Writing Award

By: Editors of Sky & Telescope June 4, 2025 0

The American Astronomical Society's High-Energy Astrophysics Division has bestowed its 2025 David N. Schramm award on Sky & Telescope Contributing Editor Govert Schilling. The award honors Schilling's feature article in S&T's May 2023 issue: “Catching Cosmic Neutrinos.”

Schilling has previously won the Schramm award, also for a Sky & Telescope feature article on neutrinos. That one appeared in our January 2014 issue and showcased the IceCube neutrino observatory in Antarctica. As a Dutch freelance astronomy journalist, Schilling has authored dozens of popular astronomy books. He is the first non-English speaker to receive the prize.

The neutrinos that Schilling has written about are tiny, neutral subatomic particles that are exceedingly difficult to detect. However, because there are so many of them flooding our universe — produced in radioactive decay, fusion reactions, and more explosive events — scientists have figured out that the best way to see them is to wait for the rare one to interact with water. In the case of IceCube, that water is frozen in the Antarctic ice; in the case of the currently under-construction KM3NET observatory, that water is deep in the Mediterranean Sea.

The neutrinos IceCube and KM3NET have detected shed light on supermassive black holes devouring gas in distant galaxies, powering gargantuan jets of plasma that escape the maw to spew into intergalactic space. They can also tell us about the inner workings of massive stars moments before before they explode as supernovae. Schilling has unveiled the detectors' promise in a feature that gives these cosmic events a human aspect, focusing on the work scientists and engineers undertake to make these detectors operational.

“I'm honored to receive the Schramm Award for the second time. But I'm especially grateful to the scientists who designed and build the facilities to detect cosmic neutrinos,” said Schilling, a science writer and astronomy author based in the Netherlands who also won the Schramm in 2014. “Without their perseverance, my stories could never have been written.”