Falcke receives the Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. This prize is awarded once every four years. Falcke will receive an amount of 25,000 dollars (more than 20,000 euros), which he has to share with his American colleague Sheperd Doeleman.
Third time
It is the third time that a scientist from the Netherlands has received the medal. In 1921, the award went to Pieter Zeeman, who had already won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1902. In 1955 the medal was awarded to Hendrik van de Hulst.
Earlier this month, Falcke’s team already received a prize from the British Royal Astronomical Society for the image of the black hole. The photo was also named the most important scientific breakthrough of 2019.
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Black holes are places in the universe where the force of gravity is so great that nothing can escape them, not even light. Everything that comes close will be swallowed up and torn apart.
Shadow
Black holes themselves are therefore not visible, but we can observe where the light distorts and disappears. Falcke called that area ‘the shadow of the black hole’. That ring of light can also be seen in Falcke’s team’s historic image, the Event Horizon Telescope.
The black hole is at the core of the galaxy Messier 87, 55 million light-years away from Earth. The photographed hole has a diameter of 40 billion kilometers, the shadow that the scientists saw is 100 billion kilometers. The hole is 6.5 billion times as massive as our sun.
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