Half of the Physics Department’s Förster Prize was awarded this year to Dr. Antonio Armeni for his dissertation. Dr. Armeni has been working since 2022 in the Space-Based Astrophysics research group under the direction of Prof. Beate Stelzer, and he received his Ph.D. in May 2025 with the distinction of summa cum laude. He had previously earned his master’s degree in physics from the University of Pisa.

Antonio Armeni’s dissertation is a study in the field of star formation. Specifically, it addresses the phenomena of mass accretion and mass outflow in so-called T Tauri stars. T Tauri stars represent an intermediate phase of the entire star formation process, which ranges from a collapsing molecular cloud to a fully formed star characterized by nuclear fusion. The T Tauri star is coupled via a magnetic field to a disk of gas and dust.

The nearest star-forming regions are located at a distance of about 500 light-years. Imaging techniques are therefore not suitable for studying stellar surfaces and the interaction region between the star and the disk due to the lack of spatial resolution of available instruments. The diagnostic tools are spectra and time series of brightness variations.

Antonio Armeni’s doctoral research consists in detailed studies of individual key objects. By combining spectroscopic data with simultaneous observations of the long-term brightness of the same T Tauri star, he was able to obtain exceptionally quantitative and concrete information about the geometry and physics of young star-disk systems. He achieved this by rigorously and consistently linking the astronomical observations available to him with fundamental physical concepts and results from magnetohydrodynamic simulations.

Antonio Armeni developed ideas that led to novel and far-reaching interpretations of the observations of T Tauri stars. His cumulative dissertation includes three first-author publications in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.