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The Event Horizon Telescope network produced the very first direct image of a black hole and its event horizon in April.Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team has plunged humanity into darkness by unveiling the world's first direct image of a black hole in April1,2,3,4,5,6. This achievement has now earned one of this year's $ 3 million of six Breakthrough awards – the most lucrative awards in science and math.
The image shows the supermassive black hole in the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, located at about 17 parsecs (55 million light-years) from Earth. We see a ring of light along the horizon of the events of the black hole – the surface of no return, beyond which the attraction of gravity is so strong that even the light can not escape its claws. The light in the ring is generated by hot matter when it goes through the event horizon. It defines a circular silhouette that represents the black hole itself.
"Two decades ago, we sought to see the invisible and this paid off dramatically," said Shep Doeleman, director of the EDH, astrophysicist at Harvard University's Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It's an incredible feeling to receive this award."
"It was the first time we saw these really strange and extreme objects with our own eyes," says Katie Mack, an astrophysicist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who is not part of the EHT collaboration. "It's really cool!" She adds.
Building the image was a huge coordinated effort. The EHT team has made simultaneous observations on eight telescopes around the world, synchronized by atomic clocks with accuracy greater than one second over 100 million years. This actually created a telescope the size of the Earth powerful enough to image the black hole. Doeleman remembers how risky it was at the beginning: "We went to the telescope, we sweated and sometimes came back empty-handed."
The award will be shared equally among the 347 members of the collaboration and will be presented at a ceremony at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California on November 3rd. In 2012, Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner founded the Breakthrough Awards; and they are now sponsored by him and other Internet entrepreneurs, including Facebook's chief Mark Zuckerberg and Sergei Brin of Google.
Life Sciences Awards
Four Breakthrough Awards were awarded in the life sciences field. Jeffrey Friedman, a geneticist at Rockefeller University in New York, has been recognized for discovering the hormone leptin, which commands the brain to regulate appetite and satiate us. He recalls "feeling weak in his knees" when, in 1994, after eight years of effort, his team managed to clone a defective version of the gene that codes for leptin in obese mice.7. "It was incredibly exciting to know the price," he says.
"Friedman's discovery was decisive: opening the door to decades of appetite discovery," says Jane Howard, an endocrinologist at King's College in London, who has studied how leptin levels caused by famine can compromise immune system.8. Although body weight appears to be regulated by a complex mix of genes and environmental factors, Friedman 's view that a single gene can have a profound effect on the body has altered the attitude of scientists to the body. regard to obesity, she says.
Virginia Man-Yee Lee, of the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, received a Breakthrough Award for her work on how proteins can get tangled in brain cells. These entanglements have been implicated in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and motor neurons (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Lee says receiving the prize is an "unexpected and pleasant surprise".
Ulrich Hartl of the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany, and Arthur Horwich of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, won a Life Science Award for their work on how the "chaperone molecules" help proteins to fall back into precise 3D shapes. Another award was awarded to David Julius, of the University of California at San Francisco, for discovering the molecular mechanisms underlying pain sensations.
Magic wands and supergravity
The groundbreaking prize in mathematics was awarded to Alex Eskin of the University of Chicago Illinois. Along with Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician awarded the Fields Medal, she tackled the "billiard ball problem," which considers the possible paths of a ball when it bounces around a polygonal pool table. . This led the pair to derive a "magic wand theorem" in 20139, given this name because it brings together aspects of topology, dynamic systems and geometry to easily solve many difficult mathematical problems.
The announcements follow that of August, when the selection committee of Breakthrough awarded a special prize in physics to particle physicists, Sergio Ferrara of CERN – European Laboratory of High Energy Physics near Geneva, in Switzerland – Daniel Freedman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen of Stony Brook University in New York. The trio developed "supergravity" – a speculative but very influential attempt to unify all the forces of nature in one theory – in the 1970sten.
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