Science ministry names Seoul National University physicist October science award winner

The science ministry said Wednesday it selected Lee Jeong-eun, a professor of physics and astronomy at Seoul National University, as the October recipient of the Korea Science and Technology Award for research that traced how the building blocks of planets form around a newborn star and travel to the cold outer reaches where comets take shape.

Lee receives the deputy prime minister's prize and 10 million won ($7,444) in prize money.

Working with the James Webb Space Telescope, Lee observed a protostar known as EC 53, whose brightness shifts on a roughly 1.5-year cycle. Rather than relying on a single observation of the object, she used time-domain spectroscopy to watch it before and after an outburst, and became the first to directly observe that crystalline silicates form only during intermittent accretion bursts, when the star draws in a sudden surge of mass.

The findings, published in the journal Nature in January, address a long-standing puzzle in astronomy: how crystalline silicates, which require temperatures above 1,000 K (730 degrees Celsius) to form, turn up in cold comets at the edge of the solar system. By combining Webb data with observations from the ALMA radio telescope array in Chile, Lee showed that crystals formed at high temperatures ride a magnetohydrodynamic "disk wind" outward to the cold region where comets form. The result suggests a similar process took place in the early solar system about 4.6 billion years ago, offering a clue to the origins of the materials that make up Earth and other planets.

"This research is an international study led by domestic researchers, and it is deeply meaningful that it revealed the full picture of material changes in the early solar system, a long-standing challenge in astronomy," Lee said. "I want to continue studying how the materials of stars, planets and even life are born and connected in space."

The award recognizes one researcher each month who has produced original work contributing to scientific and technological development over the past three years. The ministry said it upgraded the name of the former Scientist of the Month award to the Korea Science and Technology Award starting in 2026.