Nobel Prize For Physics 2020 Awarded To Roger Penrose, Jointly To Reinhard Genzel & Andrea Ghez For 'Black Hole' Related Discoveries

Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were awarded 2020 Nobel Prize in the Physics category.

Winners of 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics (Image Courtesy : The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize/Twitter)

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the first half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics to Roger Penrose and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez. The three scientists were honoured with the prestigious award for their discoveries about one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe, the black hole. The jury announcing the award said that Roger Penrose has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity." Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez on the other hand share the other half of the prize "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy." Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy.

Know About The Winners Of Nobel Prize For Physics 2020 Roger Penrose: Born 1931 in Colchester, UK, Roger Penrose is a professor at University of Oxford (UK) who showed that the general theory of relativity leads to the formation of black holes. He used ingenious mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In January 1965, ten years after Einstein’s death, Roger Penrose proved that black holes really can form and described them in detail; at their heart, black holes hide a singularity in which all the known laws of nature cease. His groundbreaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein. Reinhard Genzel: Born 1952 in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Germany, Reinhard Genzel is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany and a professor at University of California, Berkeley who holds interests in experimental astrophysics. He has been awarded with various awards including Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society (1979), Presidential Investigator Award (1983) among others. Andrea Ghez: Andrea Ghez was born 1965 in City of New York (USA) and is currently a professor at University of California, Los Angeles.  As decribed in her bio, Ghez is interested in using and developing high spatial resolution imaging techniques to investigate the proposed massive black hole at the center of our Galaxy. In her studies of star forming regions, she has found that most young stars have companion stars and the majority are located at distances that are less than the size our Solar system. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez each lead a group of astronomers that, since the early 1990s, has focused on a region called Sagittarius A at the centre of our galaxy. Using the world’s largest telescopes, Genzel and Ghez developed methods to see through the huge clouds of interstellar gas and dust to the centre of the Milky Way. Stretching the limits of technology, they refined new techniques to compensate for distortions caused by the Earth’s atmosphere, building unique instruments and committing themselves to long-term research.