Roger Penrose , Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez
An illuminated award
for an object without lights
By MARTÍN MAKLER
Titular Researcher at the Brazilian Center of Physics Research ( CBPF )
“ This year ’ s [ Nobel Prize in Physics ] award is about the darkest secrets in the Universe .” Thus , announced the secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences , the institution responsible for the award . This year , the most important science award was given to studies of black holes . These mysterious objects — which are already part of the popular imagination — are frequent in research in astrophysics . These cosmic bodies deserve popularity and scientific prominence . After all , they are truly strange - or fascinating . The most notable property ( and hence its name ): nothing can come out of them , not even the light . To be more precise , there is a “ surface ” - called the event horizon - surrounding these objects from which , if crossed , there is no way to return . There is nothing material on it . It ’ s just a border defined by the gravity of the black hole .
Black holes are extreme condensations of mass , formed by the collapse of an object ( a star , for example ). There comes our first Nobel winner , the British physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose . In 1916 , the Austrian astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild ( 1873-1916 ) obtained a strange mathematical solution of the general relativity theory equations - that is , the theory of gravity published that same year by the German physicist Albert Einstein ( 1879-1955 ). Decades later , it was realized that this solution is what we now call the black hole . But these objects are so weird and extreme - the density would be infinite in their central region - that many believed they were just a mathematical curiosity and that they would never be formed in nature . About half a century later , Penrose achieved a surprising result : under certain conditions ( very realistic ), a black hole could indeed be formed . More : the formation of these objects was inevitable . For
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