The Gruber Foundation is pleased to present the 2022 Cosmology Prize to Frank Eisenhauer for his innovative design and construction of the GRAVITY instrument, a near-infrared interferometric beam combiner for the ESO Very Large Telescope Interferometer in Chile.
GRAVITY has opened up near-infrared interferometry to help us understand a wide range of astrophysical and cosmologically important phenomena, including black holes and exoplanets.
Eisenhauer also led the construction of the SPIFFI/SINFONI, the first adaptive optics integral field spectrometer on an 8m class optical telescope. These instruments enabled the detection of general relativity effects close to a black hole by defining the orbit of the star S2 around the Galactic Center Massive Black Hole SgrA* with unprecedented and exquisite angular resolution.