[ad_1]
This year's Breakthrough prize has a nice and spacious taste.
British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell has awarded a special prize of $ 3 million for the discovery of fundamental physics, as we learned last month. Bell Burnell won for his discovery in 1967 fast-moving neutron stars known as pulsars, and for his five decades of scientific leadership after this epic discovery.
The other winners of 2019 were announced today (October 17) and include a pioneer in the field of multi-messenger astronomy, gravitational wave researchers and scientists who are studying the nature of gravity and the quantum world. [Gravitational Waves from Neutron Stars: The Discovery Explained]
Multi-messenger astronomy refers to the use of different types of information to probe the same cosmic object or phenomenon. The field was born last year, when researchers observed the consequences of an epic collision between a star and neutrons caused by electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves, spatio-temporal ripples predicted for the first time by Albert Einstein one century ago.
Theoretical astrophysicist Brian Metzger of Columbia University began trying to determine what such a collision would look like nearly a decade ago. In 2010, along with his colleagues, he published a fundamental article that made several key predictions about mergers involving the densest objects in the universe – black holes and neutron stars.
For example, researchers write, a crash involving two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole will generate a blue glow if the collision creates heavy elements in large quantities. And the overall emissions resulting from such a merger would be about 1,000 times brighter than a standard Nova explosion (an outbreak of a white dwarf star in a two-star system). Indeed, Metzger and his team coined the term "kilonova" to designate such an event.
These predictions matched what had been seen at the 2017 event – known as GW170817, as it was observed on August 17, 2017 – "remarkably well," Metzger said.
"It's really amazing to see something theoretical and see it play in nature," he told Space.com. "There are relatively few moments in astrophysics where things appear like that."
Metzger won for this work a special prize "New horizons in physics" of $ 100,000, a prize reserved for researchers at the beginning of their careers. He said he was humiliated by this recognition and emphasized the collaborative nature of the overall efforts, citing the teams whose observations of GW170817 validated his models.
One of the teams was the LIGO collaboration, the researchers who built and operated the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory. LIGO and its European counterpart, Virgo, detected the gravitational waves emitted by GW170817.
Three of LIGO's driving forces – Barry Barish, Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss – were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. And three other members of the LIGO team, like Metzger, were honored with the New Horizons Award in Physics Breakthrough of $ 100,000.
The three researchers who will share the award are Rana Adhikari from the California Institute of Technology and Lisa Barsotti and Matthew Evans, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They are being recognized for "their research on gravitational ground-based gravity sensors, present and future," according to the quote from the Breakthrough Prize.
Daniel Harlow, Daniel Jafferis and Aron Wall, respectively of MIT, Harvard University and Stanford University, receive another $ 100,000 prize as part of the discovery of new horizons in physics, for their "fundamental knowledge of quantum information, quantum field theory and gravity".
The above people are not the only laureates of this year's edition of the Revolutionary Prize in Science and Mathematics, created in 2012 by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Yuri and Julia Milner.
The Discovery Award 2019 includes seven $ 3 million awards – four in life sciences, two in basic physics (including the "Special Discovery" won by Bell Burnell) and one in mathematics. The six "New Horizons" prizes of $ 100,000 and the "Breakthrough Junior" prize of $ 400,000 bring the total prize money to $ 22 million. The laureates will be honored on November 4 at a ceremony that will be held at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, and hosted by actor Pierce Brosnan.
The $ 3 million prize is the richest in science. In comparison, each 2017 Nobel Prize amounted to SEK 9 million or US $ 1.01 million at current exchange rates.
You can find out more about this year's winners here: https://breakthroughprize.org/News/47
Mike Wall's book on the search for extraterrestrial life, "Over there" will be published on November 13 by Grand Central Publishing. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally published on Space.com.
[ad_2]
Source link
