This region in our galaxy, known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced ay-star), has a mass 4 million times that of our sun, squeezed into a space smaller than our solar system. They discovered stars orbiting a seemingly empty spot at startling speeds, a chaotic environment that could make sense only in the presence of a supermassive black hole. Genzel and Ghez spent many years poking into the cosmic cloud of interstellar gas and dust at the very center of the galaxy, with the world’s largest telescopes. Such a thing might still seem too incredible to exist, but without black holes, the movements of faraway stars in our galaxy don’t always make sense. In 1965, after Einstein’s death, Penrose, the Oxford professor, published a paper showing, mathematically, that the forces of the universe could indeed produce black holes, and that inside their impenetrable depths resides something called a singularity, an inscrutable point which no known laws of physics can describe. Entire stars, once luminous, can be extinguished if they cross a black hole’s boundary, and pass the point of no return.Īlbert Einstein predicted more than a century ago, based on his theories untangling the nature of gravity, that such strange objects could exist, but he thought the idea was too far-fetched. Forged from the cores of dead stars, they are so dense that nothing can escape their gravitational pull, not even light, which renders them invisible. Read: The absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in scienceīlack holes are among the most mysterious phenomena in the universe. (Ghez, it’s worth noting, is only the fourth woman to receive the honor in nearly 120 years of Nobel history.) Half the prize went to Roger Penrose, of the University of Oxford, who showed that black holes could exist, and half went to Reinhard Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and UC Berkeley, and Andrea Ghez, of UCLA, who provided the most convincing evidence that a particular black hole-the supermassive one at the center of our Milky Way-did. Yesterday, the Nobel Committee recognized decades of black-hole research by awarding its physics prize to three scientists. Not so long ago, scientists couldn’t say with much confidence that black holes existed, nor did they know that a giant one sits at the center of our own galaxy. To anyone more familiar with black holes from epic space films, this one mostly looked like a flame-glazed donut.īut that portrait is one of the most extraordinary achievements in modern science, a display of humankind’s capacity to reach across light-years. The reaction of the public did not necessarily match the unalloyed joy of astronomers accustomed to extracting cosmic wonders from lines in a graph. Seen in silhouette, it appeared fuzzy, as did the ring of hot gas surrounding it. Since they absorb all the light around them, we can't see black holes directly, but the surrounding glowing gas reveals a telltale circular shadow in the central region surrounded by a bright ring.The first picture ever captured of a black hole, one situated in the center of another galaxy, was pretty blurry. Size comparison of the two black holes M87* and Sagittarius A* - Credit: EHT collaboration One at the center of Galaxy M87 and three years later in 2022 the seemingly tiny one, known as Sagittarius A* at the heart of our own Galaxy, the Milky Way : "Gargantua" seen in the Movie InterstellarĪnd then in 2019, the world was thrilled by the first photos of real black holes using the Event Horizon Telescope. The 2014 film Interstellar featured a black hole that blew the minds of even seasoned scientists. Within a century of Einstein's theory, the black hole theory was proven and already found its way into pop culture. Later Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking worked on this theory until 2020 a shared noble prize was awarded to Penrose for "the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". In 1916 Karl Schwarzschild predicted them to be a theoretically possible solution to Einstein's general theory of relativity, but Einstein himself thought of them as non-physical. A common misconception is, that Albert Einstein was the first to think about black holes, but in fact, first John Michell in 1783 and later Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1796 suggested their existence for the first time.
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