The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astrophysicists today for their work on black holes, massive objects that swallow light and everything else forever that falls into their reach. They are Roger Penrose, an Englishman, Reinhard Genzel, a German, and Andrea Ghez, an American. Genzel is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.Working independently, Genzel and Ghez, and their teams, have spent the last decades tracking stars and dust clouds whizzing around the center of our galaxy with telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, trying to see if that dark dusty realm does indeed harbor a black hole. "Their pioneering work has given us the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way," the Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its announcement. For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic have appeared in dozens of sources, including NBC News, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, NPR, Vox, and The Mercury News.