Roger Penrose has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery that the formation of black holes is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”
The other half of the award went to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy.”
It should be noted that since 1901, the year in which the first of these awards was presented, only four women have won the Nobel Prize in Physics : Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963, Donna Strickland in 2018 and Andrea Ghez in 2020.
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.
Roger Penrose invented ingenious mathematical methods to explore Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He showed that the theory leads to the formation of black holes, those monsters in time and space that capture everything that enters them.
Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, for their part, discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of the stars in the center of our galaxy. A supermassive black hole is the only currently known explanation.
In January 1965, ten years after Einstein’s death, Roger Penrose showed that black holes can really form and described them in detail; at their center, black holes hide a singularity in which all known laws of nature cease. His groundbreaking article is still considered the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.
Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez each lead a group of astronomers who, since the early 1990s, have focused on a region called Sagittarius A * at the center of our galaxy. The orbits of the brightest stars closest to the center of the Milky Way have been mapped with increasing precision. The measurements of these two groups agree, and both found an extremely heavy invisible object that pulls the jumble of stars, making them race at breakneck speeds. About four million solar masses cluster in a region no larger than our solar system.
