Mátyás Vasúth passed away at 51

It is with great sadness that we learn of the passing of our beloved colleague Mátyás Vasúth. Mátyás was the leader of the Virgo group at Wigner Research Centre for Physics  in Budapest, and national representative of Hungary in the Virgo Collaboration. His primary research interests within the fields of general relativity and gravitational physics lie in the gravitational radiation of compact binary sources on eccentric orbits and in the investigation of compact stars. His last piece of research, interrupted by a prolonged illness, was to contribute to the early-warning gravitational-wave alerts. For several years, he led the Hungarian research group involved the two European scientific collaborations of Virgo and Einstein Telescope.

He was born in 1973 in Kiskunhalas, Hungary. He graduated from the Eötvös Loránd University in 1997. He conducted his research for his master’s degree and later for his PhD at the Theoretical Department of KFKI, earned his doctoral degree with summa cum laude honors in 2003. Mátyás worked for decades as a senior research fellow at the KFKI and then at its successor institution, the HUN-REN Wigner RCP. Mátyás passed away after a prolonged illness at the age of 51, on February 8, 2024 in Budapest, Hungary.

The European Gravitational Observatory and the Virgo Collaboration express their deepest condolences to family and friends of Mátyás, he will be deeply missed by his colleagues and the whole gravitational wave community.