Tag: Breakthrough Prize

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Black hole portrait wins Breakthrough Prize

Black hole
This image from the Event Horizon Telescope shows the supermassive black hole in the elliptical galaxy M87, surrounded by superheated material. (EHT Collaboration)

What’s $3 million divided by 347? That’s the math problem to be solved by the physicists on the Event Horizon Telescope team, who won one of the top awards in the Breakthrough Prize program for snapping the first picture showing the dark maw of a supermassive black hole.

Now in its eighth year, the “Oscars of Science” honor achievements in fundamental physics, life sciences and mathematics. Past winners have included the late British physicist Stephen Hawking and the teams behind the Large Hadron Collider (for discovering the Higgs Boson), the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (a.k.a. LIGO) and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (for producing a map of the Big Bang’s afterglow).

The lineup of backers is almost as well known as the lineup of laureates: It’s the brainchild of Israeli-Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and his wife Julia, with Google co-founder Sergei Brin, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Ma Huateng and Anne Wojcicki also serving as sponsors.

Each Breakthrough Prize carries a $3 million award, to be shared by the recipients. That calls for some arithmetic when you’re talking about the more than 1,000 scientists behind LIGO’s award-winning detection of a black hole merger.

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Breakthrough Prizes give $22M to science pioneers

Breakthrough Prize ceremony
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner speak onstage during a Breakthrough Prize awards ceremony in 2016. (Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize / Kimberly White)

The program known as the “Oscars of Science” has revealed who’ll be getting the spotlight — and almost $22 million in awards — at next month’s Breakthrough Prize ceremony in Silicon Valley.

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its sponsors listed nine researchers as recipients of the Breakthrough Prize for important achievements in the life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics, plus 12 early-career scientists who’ll be getting New Horizon Prizes.

Each of the Breakthrough Prizes is worth $3 million, which exceeds the $1.1 million cash value of the longer-running Nobel Prize. Each New Horizon Prize is worth $100,000. In some cases, multiple researchers share the prize.

The Breakthrough Prize program, now in its seventh year, is sponsored by Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner and his wife, Julia; Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan; Google co-founder Sergey Brin; 23andMe CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki; and Tencent Holdings CEO and co-founder Ma Huateng.

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Pulsar discoverer wins $3 million prize … at last

Jocelyn Bell Burnell
British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell is featured in an episode of the BBC documentary series “Beautiful Minds.” (BBC Photo)

British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell missed out on a share of the Nobel Prize for her part in the discovery of the first radio pulsars in 1967, but now she has a $3 million Breakthrough Prize all to herself.

Bell Burnell’s selection for the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was announced today, and she’ll receive the award during a Nov. 4 ceremony that will also honor winners of the annual prizes in physics, life sciences and math.

Organizers of the Breakthrough Prize program said the award serves to recognize Bell Burnell’s “fundamental contributions to the discovery of pulsars, and a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community,”

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SETI scientists hear nothing from interstellar object

Green Bank Telescope
The Breakthrough Listen initiative uses the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. (NRAO Photo)

The scientists behind the Breakthrough Listen initiative say they haven’t detected any radio signals coming from a strange interstellar object known as ‘Oumuamua, but there are still more observations to be made and analyzed.

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Is weird object a starship? Scientists will check

'Oumuamua
An artist’s conception shows what the interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua might look like. (ESO Illustration / M. Kornmesser)

Is that cigar-shaped, fast-moving interstellar object a spaceship? Almost certainly not, but Breakthrough Listen will check just to make sure.

The Breakthrough Listen campaign, which checks celestial targets for radio signals from intelligent civilizations, will turn the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia toward the object, known as ‘Oumuamua, starting Dec. 13.

Scientists will check for emissions across four radio bands from 1 to 12 GHz. The first phase of observations will take up 10 hours, divided into four key time periods based on ‘Oumuamua’s period of rotation.

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Cosmic mappers win share of glitzy spotlight

WMAP map of cosmos
A color-coded projection map of the full sky shows temperature variations as measured by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. (NASA Photo)

This year’s Breakthrough Prizes, cast as the “Oscars of Science,” are going to genetic engineers, disease fighters, math whizzes — and the scientists on the cosmos-mapping team behind the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP.

Today’s award of $22 million in prizes is being wrapped into a ceremony at NASA’s Ames Research Center that combines Hollywood glitz with Silicon Valley brainpower.

Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman is the host for the show, which is being televised by National Geographic and streamed live via Facebook and YouTube at 7 p.m. PT tonight. Celebrity presenters include Ashton Kutcher (“That ’70s Show”); his wife, Mila Kunis (“Bad Moms”); and Kerry Washington (“Scandal”).

The prize program was established in 2012 by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and his wife, Julia Milner, in league with Google co-founder Sergey Brin, 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

It ranks among science’s richest award programs, with seven $3 million prizes being awarded this year in life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics. Another $1 million is going out to early-career scientists, students and teachers.

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Billionaire wants to look for life on Enceladus

Oliver Morton and Yuri Milner
Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, at right, chats with The Economist’s Oliver Morton during the “New Space Age” conference at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner today laid out his vision to send the first privately funded interplanetary space mission to look for life at the Saturnian moon Enceladus — but first he had to address less lofty matters.

Milner has been in the news for the past week because newly published confidential documents known as the “Paradise Papers” revealed that two firms controlled by the Russian government backed his early investments in Facebook and Twitter.

So, of course, that was the first topic Milner was asked about during an onstage fireside chat at The Economist’s “New Space Age” conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

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Alien hunters track strange radio bursts

Green Bank Telescope
Intriguing signals have been picked up via West Virginia’s Green Bank Telescope. (NRAO Photo)

Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million initiative aimed at stepping up the search for alien signals, says it’s picked up an intriguing series of 15 fast radio bursts emanating from a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away.

It’s way too early to claim that the signals from the galaxy, which hosts a radio source known as FRB 121102, constitute the kind of evidence sought for decades by researchers specializing in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.

But Breakthrough Listen’s researchers say that possibility can’t yet be ruled out.

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Here’s how to stop a speeding starship

Starshot mission
The aim of the Starshot project is to send a tiny spacecraft propelled by an enormous rectangular photon sail to the Alpha Centauri star system, as shown in this artist’s conception, (Planetary Habitability Laboratory, University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo)

Millions of dollars are being spent on a scheme to speed up swarms of tiny sail-equipped probes to 20 percent of the speed of light and send them past Alpha Centauri – but how do you slow them down again?

German researchers suggest using the same light sails that got the probes going so fast in the first place.

René Heller, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, and information technology specialist Michael Hippke worked out a plan could be factored into Breakthrough Starshot’s decades-long mission plan. The details are laid out today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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VLT joins search for Alpha Centauri’s planets

VLT and Alpha Centauri
The ESO’s Very Large Telescope looms in the foreground of this image, and a star map has been superimposed on the sky to show the locations of Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri. (ESO Photo)

One of the most powerful observing instruments on Earth, the Very Large Telescope, will join the search for potentially habitable planets around the Alpha Centauri star system.

The survey will take place in 2019 under the terms of an agreement signed by the European Southern Observatory, which operates the VLT in Chile, and by the Breakthrough Initiatives.

The Breakthrough Initiatives are funded by such luminaries as Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The effort includes in a radio search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, known as Breakthrough Listen; and a plan to send swarms of nano-probes through the Alpha Centauri system, known as Breakthrough Starshot.

For months, the Breakthrough team has been working out the details for a campaign to look for worlds around Alpha Centauri, informally known as Breakthrough Watch. Such observations would complement Breakthrough Starshot.

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