3 win Nobel Prize in physics for research about black holes
Reinhard Genzel, left, Andrea Ghez and Roger Penrose were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for their work in advancing our understanding of black holes.
STOCKHOLM — Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physicsTuesday for establishing the all-tooweird reality of black holes — the straight-out-of-sciencecosmic monsters that suck up light and time — and eventually us.
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 didn’t think they existed.
Genzel, who is at 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 prettyweird thing,” Penrose said. He added 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, soit’s notsomethingto 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 and twist light in a way that seems unreal and cause time to slowand stop.
“Black holes, because they are so hard to understand, is what makes them so appealing,” Ghez, 55, said after becoming the fourth woman to win a physics Nobel. “I really think of science as a big, giant puzzle.”
While the three scientists showed the existence of black holes, it wasn’t until last year that people could see one for themselves when another science team captured the first and only opticalimageofone. It looks like a flaming doughnut from hell but is in a galaxy 53 million light-years from
Earth.
Genzel, 68, and Ghez won because “they showed that black holes are not just theory — they’re real, they’re here, and there’s a monster-size black hole in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way,” said Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist and mathematician at ColumbiaUniversity.
In the 1990s, Genzel and Ghez, leading separate groups of astronomers, trained their sights on the dust-covered center of our Milky Way galaxy, a region called Sagittarius A(asterisk), where something strangewas going on. Itwas “an extremely heavy, invisible object that pulls on the jumble of stars, causing them to rush around at dizzying speeds,” according to theNobel Committee.
It was a black hole. Not just an ordinary black hole, but a supermassive one, 4 million times the mass of our sun.
The first image Ghez got was in 1995, using the Keck Telescope in Hawaii that had just gone online. A year later, another image seemed to indicate that the stars near the center of the Milky Way were circling something.
A third image led Ghez and Genzel to think they were on to something.