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Three scientists have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for work to understand black holes.
Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were announced as this year’s winners at a news conference in Stockholm.
The winners will share the prize money of 10 million kronor (£864,200).
Swedish industrialist and chemist Alfred Nobel founded the prizes in his will, written in 1895 – a year before his death.
David Haviland, chair of the physics prize committee, said this year’s award “celebrates one of the most exotic objects in the Universe”.
UK-born physicist Roger Penrose demonstrated that black holes were an inevitable consequence of Albert’s Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez provided the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy – the Milky Way.
They found that this huge object, known as Sagittarius A*, was tugging on the jumble of stars orbiting it.
Previous winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics
2019 – James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz shared the prize for ground-breaking discoveries about the Universe.
2018 – Donna Strickland, Arthur Ashkin and Gerard Mourou were awarded the prize for their discoveries in the field of laser physics.
2017 – Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish earned the award for the detection of gravitational waves.
2016 – David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz shared the award for their work on rare phases of matter.
2015 – Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald were awarded the prize the discovery that neutrinos switch between different “flavours”.
2014 – Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura won the physics Nobel for developing the first blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
2013 – Francois Englert and Peter Higgs shared the spoils for formulating the theory of the Higgs boson particle.
2012 – Serge Haroche and David J Wineland were awarded the prize for their work with light and matter.
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