Three scientists earn Nobel Prize in Physics for work on black holes

The Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded to three scientists for their work advancing our understanding of “black holes and the Milky Way’s darkest secret,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday.

One-half of the award was given to Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, and the other half was awarded jointly to Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the University of California, Berkeley, and Andrea Ghez of UCLA, according to the academy.

Penrose was awarded for his use of “ingenious mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity” in his work that was published in 1965. Though his theory predicted their existence, Albert Einstein did not actually believe that black holes were real, and it wasn’t until April 2019 that the first image of a black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope.

Though he never found one, 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 1965 article “is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.”

Genzel and Ghez were awarded jointly for their separate work that culminated in the discovery “of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.” Both scientists focused their study on a region of the sky known as Sagittarius A*, and their measurements both found “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.”

“Their pioneering work has given us the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way,” the academy wrote.

Nobel Committee for Physics Chairman David Haviland said that “the discoveries of this year’s Laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects. But these exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research