Penrose received the award “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.” While Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were cited by the Nobel Assembly as well “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.”

Many may recognize Roger Penrose for the ‘Penrose Staircase.” This was the inspiration behind the famous staircase drawing by Escher – a staircase that seems to loop back on itself never really going anywhere.

But In 1965, Roger Penrose was the first to prove mathematically that Black Holes are in fact a natural consequence of relativity theory. Einstein had predicted Black Holes, but it was Penrose who proved they were real.

The three Nobel Prize recipients all received funding from the Nation Science Foundation.

Penrose developed his ‘black hole formation’ theory at Rice University. Gentzel uses his NSF funds working with infrared astronomy at the University of California-Berkeley.

Meanwhile, at UCLA, Ghez and her team have used the NSF money on the development of instrumentation for the W.M. Keck Observatory. Using this powerful observatory, they have been able to track the orbit of a star circling the supermassive black hole which sits at the center of Milky Way galaxy in which we live.

In a statement, NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said, “Few phenomena in the universe have captivated the imaginations of both the public and the scientific community like black holes, and thanks to these researchers, all of whom have received NSF support, we have to rely on our imaginations a little less.”

“They used mathematics and innovative astrophysics techniques to explore the nature of these incredible objects and reveal the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy.”

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