Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) is delighted to announce the winner of the 2026 MNRAS Student Prize.
The annual prize recognises papers that, in the view of the MNRAS Editorial Board, are the best submitted in a given 12-month period with a student as the first or corresponding author.
The winner of the 2026 MNRAS Student Prize is Daisaburo Kido, of the University of Tokyo, who was recognised for the paper 'Black Hole Envelopes in Little Red Dots' by Daisaburo Kido, Kunihito Ioka, Kenta Hotokezaka, Kohei Inayoshi, and Christopher M Irwin.
He said: "I am deeply honoured to receive the 2026 MNRAS Student Author Prize. I would like to thank my collaborators for their invaluable support throughout this project, and I hope that our work on Little Red Dots will help stimulate further discussion and observations of these intriguing objects."
MNRAS Editor Professor Martin Ward said: "The understanding of the nature of Little Red Dots (LRDs) is one of the most intriguing issues raised by JWST observations.
"They propose a scenario that can explain many of the features of LRDs for example; the presence of a photosphere that emerges either within the envelope or in the infalling medium, with a characteristic temperature of 5000–7000 K, near the Hayashi limit.
"The resulting blackbody emission naturally explains the red optical continuum of the distinct V-shaped spectrum observed in most LRDs. Furthermore, the dynamical timescale at the photosphere, ∼ 0.01 pc, is consistent with the observed year-scale variabilities.
"I believe the paper makes a valuable contribution to the debate over the nature of LRDs."
To find out more about the MNRAS Student Prize, visit https://academic.oup.com/mnras/pages/student-awards.
ENDS
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Images & captions
Caption: Daisaburo Kido, of the University of Tokyo, has been announced as the winner of the 2026 MNRAS Student Prize.
Credit: Supplied
Caption: Concept of the BH envelope from the winning paper ‘Black Hole Envelopes in Little Red Dots’. The BH envelope serves to block and gravitationally confine the outflow from the super-Eddington disc. Meanwhile, energy is transported through radiation and convection and radiated away from the envelope surface.
Credit: Daisaburo Kido
Notes for editors
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