UCLA's Andrea Ghez, a fierceless explorer of our galaxy, wins the Nobel Prize. She proved that supermassive black holes exist in galactic centres observationally by mapping the movement of stars. Their high velocity implied the presence of a very heavy object. In addition to being a wonderful astronomer, she is the mother of two boys, which means she succeeded in being both a mom and an award winning scientist and that there is hope for other women who want to have it all. She breaks the 60 year cycle by wining the Nobel Prize in physics only two years after Donna Strickland. Donna won hers for generating high intensity, ultra-short pulses of light. Before Donna, the previous female Nobel laurate was Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963. Then came Marie Curie in 1903. Thank you, Andrea, for being such an inspiration!
Andrea shares her prize with Sir Roger Penrose, who showed that black holes were a viable theoretical possibility, and Reinhard Genzel, the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for extra-terrestrial physics.
The Nobel Prize in Chemestry was also awarded to two women -- Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna -- for developing a method known as CRISPR-cas9, which enables the precise editing of specific genes in the DNA to, e.g., remove errors that lead to diseases.
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