Jocelyn Bell Burnell, British astrophysicist won 3 million dollars for her fast-spinning neutron stars back in 1967, at Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
On October 17 2019 were rewarded the other winners, researcher of the gravitational-wave, a pioneer that worked at -messenger astronomy and investigating the nature of gravity and the quantum realm.
The multi-messenger astronomy is the use of different types of information to investigate the same cosmic object or phenomenon. It was discovered last year after researchers witnessed both electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves a neutron-star collision.
Brian Metzger, a theoretical astrophysicist of Columbia University and his team tried to predict how a collision looks like, over a decade ago.
He published a work about two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole that can generate a blue glow if the collision creates heavy elements in significant quantities. Metzger and his team named this event “kilonova”.
“It’s really amazing when you come up with something theoretical and then see it play out in nature, there are relatively few times in astrophysics when things just pop out like that.” He reported.
Metzger got an award of $100,000 for “New Horizons in Physics” at Breakthrough Prize. He cited the teams that gave the GW170817 observations to validate his models.
LIGO Collaboration was one of the teams, which got a price in 2017 Nobel Prize.
Barry Barish, Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss were the members of this project and also received a $100,000 in New Horizons in Physics Breakthrough Prize.
Daniel Harlow, Daniel Jafferis and Aron Wall are sharing $100,000 New Horizons in Physics Breakthrough Prize for “fundamental insights about quantum information, quantum field theory, and gravity.”
The 2019 Breakthrough Prize featured seven $3 million awards. One was in mathematics, four in life sciences, and two in fundamental physics. If we add the six $100,000 “New Horizons” prizes and the $400,000 “Breakthrough Junior Prize” it will be a total of $22 million.
The winners will be getting their price on November 4 during an event at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, host by actor Pierce Brosnan.
Agnes is a technical writer, being in touch with reports to come up with the latest tech leaks.
