The Nobel Committee announced today that British scholar Roger Penrose, German scientist Genzel and American scholar Geezer have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of one of the most bizarre phenomena in the universe, a black hole.
The Nobel Committee said that Roger Penrose, 89, was honored for proving that black holes can form using the theory of general relativity.
Reinhard Genzel, 68, and Andrea Ghez, 55, were jointly awarded the prize for their discovery of “an invisible, extremely massive object that dominates the orbit of a star at the center of our galaxy,” the Nobel Committee said.
Penrose works at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Gitz is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, USA.
Genzel served at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and at the University of California.
In 1965, Penrose used mathematical models to prove that black holes can form and that nothing can escape from them, not even light. His calculations proved that black holes are a direct result of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Black holes are extremely dense objects formed when heavy stars collapse under their own gravitational pull.
Genzel and Gitz have led research since the early 1990s, focusing on a region at the center of the Milky Way called Sagittarius A* (Sagittarius A*).
Using the world’s largest telescope, the two discovered that an invisible object with a very large mass attracts the surrounding stars, creating a unique vortex in our Milky Way galaxy. The object’s mass is about 4 million times that of the Sun.
The two men developed a special method that allowed them to see through the huge nebula formed by interstellar gas and dust to the center of the Milky Way. In April 2019, astronomers revealed the first-ever photo of a black hole.
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