Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 awarded to 3 scientists for 'discoveries about black hole'

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for their discoveries about the black hole,  Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on October 6. The first half of the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Roger Penrose “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.” The other half has been awarded jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.”

“Three Laureates share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their discoveries about one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe, the black hole,” said the academy in a statement.

Nobel Prize laureate Roger Penrose invented ingenious mathematical methods to explore Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The academy said that Penrose showed that the theory leads to the formation of black holes, those monsters in time and space that capture everything that enters them. Born in UK 1931, Roger Penrose completed his PhD from University of Cambridge, UK and worked as Professor at University of Oxford.

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'Supermassive black hole'

Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez each lead a group of astronomers who have focused on a region at the centre of the Milky Way since the early 1990s. Both groups found something that is both invisible and heavy, forcing this jumble of stars to swirl around. They discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy. 

“According to the current theory of gravity, there is only one candidate – a supermassive black hole,” the academy said.

Reinhard Genzel completed PhD from University of Bonn, Germany and worked as Director at Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Andrea Ghez is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Prize amount of 10 million Swedish kronor will be divided into two with one half to Roger Penrose and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez.  

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