3 awarded Nobel Prize for physics

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for establishing the all-too-weird reality of black holes — the straightout-of-science-fiction cosmic monsters that suck up light and time and will eventually swallow us, too.

Roger Penrose of Britain, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and Andrea Ghez of the United States explained to the world these dead ends of the cosmos that are still not completely understood but are deeply connected, somehow, to the creation of galaxies.

Penrose, an 89-year-old at the University of Oxford, received half of the prize for proving with mathematics in 1964 that Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted the formation of black holes, even though Einstein himself didn’t think they existed. Genzel, who is at both the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the University of California, Berkeley, and Ghez, of the University of California, Los Angeles, received the other half of the prize for discovering in the 1990s a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Black holes fascinate people because “the idea of some monster out there sucking everything up is a pretty weird thing,” Penrose said. He said our galaxy and the galaxies near us “will ultimately get swallowed by one utterly huge black hole. This is the fate … but not for an awful long time, so it’s not something to worry too much about.”

Black holes are at the center of every galaxy, and smaller ones dot the universe. They are so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. They warp light and cause time to slow and stop.