There’s a black hole at the center of this year’s Nobel Prize for physics. Announced Tuesday, Oxford University mathematician Roger Penrose, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics astronomer Reinhard Genzel, and University of California, Los Angeles astronomer Andrea Ghez will share the 114th Nobel Prize for their pioneering work on the formation of black holes, and the discovery of a giant one at the heart of the Milky Way.
Black holes are regions of spacetime in which the gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from it. The boundary from which no escape is possible from a black hole is called an event horizon. The concept of objects with such significant gravitational fields was suggested as far back as the 18th century, although it took until the 20th century until the idea was considered in more detail. Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, for instance, showed that gravity is capable of changing the movement of light. In the 1960s, Penrose showed that black holes could appear generically, rather than as mathematical anomalies. Before this, experts — including Einstein — suggested that black holes don’t exist in physical reality.
Genzel and Ghez, meanwhile, were honored for their work using the world’s largest telescopes to discover a supermassive object in the galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, which could only possibly be a black hole. Imaging a black hole is extremely challenging because, with no light able to get out of them, they are rendered invisible to the naked eye. They can only be observed by using space telescopes with special tools that are able to see how stars in close proximity to a black hole act differently to other stars. When a black hole is near to a star, it creates a high-energy light that can be identified under certain conditions.
“There is a major problem in physics in that we have a wonderful theory about gravity, courtesy of Albert Einstein, and then a beautiful model of everything else in nature that is not related to gravity,” Ralph Scheicher, a researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Sweden’s Uppsala University, told Digital Trends, explaining why black holes are such a source of fascination. “Both work fantastically well in that they make predictions that match experiments, but they cannot both be right. They don’t fit with each other to form one unified Theory Of Everything. And so scientists look for modifications of either theory. Because black holes are such extreme objects with unimaginably strong gravitational fields, they are a perfect testing ground to observe and test predictions from [the] General Theory of Relativity.”
Genzel and Ghez will share half of the Nobel Prize, while Penrose receives the other half. Ghez is only the fourth woman in history to receive a Nobel Prize for physics since the prize was founded in 1901. Out of more than 200 laureates, only Marie Curie, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, and Donna Strickland are other female laureates to win the physics prize.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.