Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez have been bagged the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for their excellent work on space.
Roger Penrose bring home the bacon in Physics for his work on black hole and the general theory of relativity.
In its view, the Academy said Roger Penrose was 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, who have jointly bagged the other half of the prize, have been awarded “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy”, the academy said.
In their statement, the Academy said this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is given to three Laureates for their discoveries about “one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe, the black hole”.
Explaining the research further, they said Roger Penrose used adroit mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct result of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
According to the statement, Einstein himself did not believe that black holes really exist.
“His ground-breaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein,” the Academy said in its statement.
Talking about the work of Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, the Academy said both of them individually lead a group of astronomers that, since the early 1990s, has focused on a region called Sagittarius A* at the centre of our galaxy-Milky Way.
“The orbits of the brightest stars closest to the middle of the Milky Way have been mapped with increasing precision. The measurements of these two groups agree, with both finding an extremely heavy, invisible object that pulls on the jumble of stars, causing them to rush around at dizzying speeds. Around four million solar masses are packed together in a region no larger than our solar system,” the statement said.
For the research, Genzel and Ghez used the world’s largest telescopes and developed ways 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. Their pioneering work has given us the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.”
