New Delhi: Three scientists–Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez—will share the Nobel Prize in Physics, 2020, for their pioneering work on space involving the black holes and the Milky Way’s darkest secrets.
Announcing the award in Stockholm on Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science said one half of the Prize in Physics will go to Penrose and the other half jointly to Genzel and Ghez.
In its citation, the Academy said Penrose has been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”
Genzel and Ghez have been awarded “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy”, the Academy said.
“Roger Penrose showed that the general theory of relativity leads to the formation of black holes. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the center of our galaxy,” the Academy said.
Penrose, 89, is a mathematician who used novel mathematical methods to prove that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Einstein, who died in 1955, did not himself believe that black holes really existed.
However, in January 1965, Penrose proved that black holes really can form and hide a singularity in which all the known laws of nature cease.
“His ground-breaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein,” the Academy said.
About the work done by Genzel and Ghez, the Academy said each of them led a group of astronomers that, since the early 1990s, has focused on a region called Sagittarius A* at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
They used the world’s largest telescopes and developed methods to see through the huge clouds of interstellar gas and dust to the center of the Milky Way.
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