The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three scientists for their work involving some of the cosmos’ most mysterious, darkest secrets: black holes. Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford in the UK received half of the prize “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity,” while Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles and Reinhard Genzel of the University of Bonn and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany jointly shared the other half “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy”.
The trio includes the fourth woman ever to receive the physics Nobel prize
© NASA
For his part, Penrose showed with eloquent mathematical models that the very existence of black holes is a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s most famous theory; in fact, Einstein didn’t believe such heavyweights - objects that devour everything that comes within their reach - even existed.