Space/Science
This text cribbed from NPR: Oct. 8, 2002 -- This year's Nobel Prize in physics is awarded to three scientists for their contributions to astrophysics. American Raymond Davis Jr. and Japan's Masatoshi Koshiba will split half the prize; the other half goes to American Riccardo Giacconi. NPR's David Kestenbaum reports. Davis, 87, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Koshiba, 76, of the University of Tokyo, won for their work with elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos. Trillions pass through Earth each second, undetected and disturbing nothing. Davis stubbornly tried to detect neutrinos coming from the sun by using a giant tank of liquid buried in a mine. He succeeded, and confirmed that fusion powered the sun. Neutrinos are created during that same process. Masatoshi Koshiba led a more recent neutrino experiment in Japan. It detected neutrinos from even farther away -- a distant star exploding in a supernova. Riccardo Giacconi, 71, of the Associated Universities in Washington, D.C., won the other half of the Nobel Prize for his work with cosmic X-rays. He built the first X-ray telescope and discovered strange sources of X-rays in the universe. Physicists now think those sources are black holes. ----------------------------------------------------- Here's a compilation of all the physics Laureates since 1901, courtesy of SLAC.
