In the Media

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 19, 2019 -- The American Institute of Physics (AIP) announced astronomer Virginia Trimble has been selected to receive the 2019 Andrew Gemant Award, an annual prize recognizing contributions to the cultural, artistic and humanistic dimension of physics.

In the late 20th century, it started to become clear to astronomers that every big galaxy in the Universe has a supermassive black hole in its center. These are not like the ones that form when massive stars explode, which have a few times the Sun's mass. These are soul-crushing monsters, with millions or billions of times the Sun's mass.

What happens inside a black hole stays inside a black hole, but what happens inside a black hole’s “sphere of influence” – the innermost region of a galaxy where a black hole’s gravity is the dominant force – is of intense interest to astronomers and can help determine the mass of a black hole as well as its impact on its galactic neighborhood.

What happens inside a black hole stays inside a black hole, but what happens inside a black hole’s “sphere of influence” – the innermost region of a galaxy where a black hole’s gravity is the dominant force – is of intense interest to astronomers and can help determine the mass of a black hole as well as its impact on its galactic neighborhood.

Gerard Mourou—one of the three winners of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics—claims that the lifespan of radioactive waste could potentially be cut to minutes from thousands of years.