STOCKHOLM (SWEDEN) – The outstanding discoveries about black holes have fetched Britain’s Roger Penrose, Germany’s Reinhard Genzel and US scientist Andrea Ghez the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.
Using mathematics to prove that black holes are the consequence of the theory of relativity, Penrose, professor at the University of Oxford, won half the prize.
The other half of the prize was shared by Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute and University of California, Berkeley, and Ghez, at the University of California, Los Angeles. They found out that an invisible and extremely heavy object controls the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy.
Physics is the second category of the Nobels to be given out this year. On Monday, three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their discovery of Hepatitis C.
Physics has always hogged the limelight among the prizes with previous awards going to stalwarts such as Albert Einstein for groundbreaking discoveries about the make-up of the universe.
“The discoveries of this year’s Laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects,” David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said. The prize comprises 10 million Swedish crown (£863,793).
“But these exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research.”
Ghez is the fourth woman to win the prize for physics after Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018.
