Gruber Cosmology Prize for Frank Eisenhauer

High honour: Frank Eisenhauer from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics was awarded the Gruber Cosmology Prize. ESO / M. Zamani High honour: Frank Eisenhauer from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics was awarded the Gruber Cosmology Prize. ESO / M. Zamani - The scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics is honoured for developing pioneering instruments The 2022 Gruber Cosmology Prize recognizes Frank Eisenhauer of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics for the revolutionary design of instruments that collected seemingly irrefutable evidence for the existence of a black hole at the center of our Galaxy. The citation honors the "unprecedented and exquisite" precision of his instrumentation. The prize is endowed with 500,000 US dollars. In 2018, the Gravity experiment traced the behavior of various phenomena near Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), a supermassive and therefore gravitationally voracious, invisible object near the center of our Galaxy. Thanks to Eisenhauer's technical innovations, the Gravity team found that the orbit of stars and gas near the Galactic centre matches theoretical predictions consistent with the existence of a black hole.