The Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday crowned three pioneers of research on "
black holes
", regions of the Universe from which nothing can escape: the British Roger Penrose, the German Reinhard Genzel and the American Andrea Ghez.
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Penrose, 89, won the famous award for discovering "
that the formation of a black hole is a strong prediction of general theory of relativity
", while Genzel, 68, and Ghez, 55, were rewarded for "
the discovery of a compact supermassive object in the center of our galaxy
", explained the Nobel jury when announcing the prize in Stockholm.
Andrea Ghez becomes the fourth woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, the most masculine of the six Scandinavian prizes.
The British winner receives half of the prize endowed with around one million euros, while the other two share the second half, said the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
Supermassive black holes are an astrophysical conundrum, especially about how they get so big.
Their training is at the heart of modern astrophysical research.
Scientists believe they are devouring, at breakneck speed, all the gases emitted by the very dense galaxies around them.
Read also: Marie and Pierre Curie, laureates of the Nobel Prize in physics on December 10, 1903
As they are invisible, we can only see them by contrast, by observing the phenomena they cause in their immediate environment.
A first revolutionary image was revealed to the world in April 2019.
Astrophysics, as well as quantum physics, centered on the infinitely small, were considered favorites by experts for this Nobel 2020.
Last year, he had already rewarded three cosmologists: the Canadian-American James Peebles, who followed in those of Albert Einstein to shed light on the origins of the universe;
and the Swiss Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz who were the first to reveal the existence of a planet outside the solar system.
