WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Three scientists share this year's Nobel Prize in Physics for their discoveries that helped understand the black hole.
Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez have been awarded the coveted prize for the discovery that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the center of the galaxy.
Sir Roger Penrose won the award for the discovery that 'black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.'
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said one half of the prize money, 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.12 million), will go to Penrose and the other half jointly to Genzel and Ghez.
Penrose, 89, is a Briton, and is Professor at University of Oxford.
Genzel, 68, is German. He is Director at Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, and also Professor at University of California, Berkeley.
Ghez, 55, is American. A professor at University of California, Los Angeles, she is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel in physics, out of more than 200 laureates.
Penrose used ingenious mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Einstein did not himself believe that black holes really exist.
Black holes are super-heavyweight monsters that capture everything that enters them. Nothing can escape, not even light.
In January 1965, ten years after Einstein's death, Penrose proved that black holes really can form and described them in detail; at their heart, black holes hide a singularity in which all the known laws of nature cease. His groundbreaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.
Using the world's largest telescopes, Genzel and Ghez developed methods to see through the huge clouds of interstellar gas and dust to the center of the Milky Way. Stretching the limits of technology, they refined new techniques to compensate for distortions caused by the Earth's atmosphere, building unique instruments and committing themselves to long-term research. 'Their pioneering work has given us the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way,' the Academy said in a press release.
'The discoveries of this year's Laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects', said David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics. 'But these exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research. Not only questions about their inner structure, but also questions about how to test our theory of gravity under the extreme conditions in the immediate vicinity of a black hole,' he added.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX