Three scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for improving our understanding of black holes.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Britain’s Roger Penrose will receive half of this year’s award “for the discovery that the formation of black holes is a strong prediction of the general theory of relativity.”
Goran K Hansson, secretary general of the academy, said that German Reinhard Genzel and American Andrea Ghez will receive the second half of the award “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object in the center of our galaxy.” The awards celebrate “one of the most exotic objects in the universe,” black holes, which have become a staple of science fiction and scientific fact and where time seems to have stood still, Nobel committee scientists said.
Penrose proved with mathematics that the formation of black holes was possible, relying largely on Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Genzel and Ghez looked at the dust-covered center of our Milky Way galaxy, where something strange was happening, several stars moving around something. they couldn’t see.
It was a black hole. Not just an ordinary black hole, but a supermassive black hole, 4 million times the mass of our sun.
Now scientists know that all galaxies have supermassive black holes.
It is common for several scientists who worked in related fields to share the award. Last year’s award went to Canadian cosmologist James Peebles for his theoretical work on the first moments after the Big Bang, and Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for discovering a planet outside our solar system.
The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and a prize money of SEK 10 million (over US $ 1.1 million), courtesy of a legacy left 124 years ago by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred. Nobel. The amount was recently increased to adjust for inflation.
On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the physiology and medicine prize to Americans Harvey J Alter and Charles M Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton for discovering the hepatitis C virus that devastates the liver.
The other awards, to be announced in the coming days, are for outstanding work in the fields of chemistry, literature, peace and economics.
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