The orbits of stars within the central 1.0 X 1.0 arcseconds of our galaxy. Andrea Ghez/UCLA
Reinhard Genzel, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, has won this year’s Shaw Prize for astronomy. Genzel pulled off a pretty neat trick by observing individual stars circling the center of the Milky Way, our home in the universe. The stars he observed were close to the galactic center — within light-hours, not light-years, of the center. Genzel and his colleagues developed new instruments and carried out many difficult observations for a number of years to prove that a supermassive black hole lurks at our galaxy’s core.
Now here’s what I found even more remarkable: The Shaw prize pays 1 million bucks! Sadly, today they are paying only 0.644039415 Euros to the dollar, hardly enough for Genzel to buy himself a celebratory cappuccino.
George Smoot, who won the Nobel Prize for helping to discover the cosmic background radiation, took home a cool $1.4 million. Then he donated it to a charitable fund for science education.
Jeez, you’d think he could kick back just a few thousand to all us science writers who penned so many astonished and positive articles about his work!
What may NOT pay in astronomy, depending on your position and skill, is actually doing it. According to CollegeGrad.com, astronomers in the top 10 percent income bracket earn more than $132,780. But the lowest 10 percent earn less than $49,450. That’s not a lot of dough if you consider the years of education required.
The late Carl Sagan found a way to have your astronomy degree and eat your cake, too — as a media personality, speaker, and author. And whatever he earned, it was certainly well deserved for listening for years and years to people mimicking his “billions and billions” line from Cosmos.