Three scientists receive award for work on black hole formation
Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were announced as this year’s Nobel prize winners for Physics at a news conference in Stockholm.
Roger Penrose, 89, was honoured for showing “that the Einstein’s general theory of relativity leads to the formation of black holes”, while German physicist Reinhard Genzel, 68, and American Prof. Andrea Ghez, 55, were jointly awarded for discovering “that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy”. Using the world’s largest telescopes, they discovered an extremely heavy, invisible object, ‘Sagittarius A’, around 4 million times greater than the mass of our Sun, that pulls on the surrounding stars, giving our galaxy Milky Way its characteristic swirl.
UK born physicist Penrose used mathematical modelling to prove back in 1965 that black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from them. Imagine setting a large body in the center of a trampoline. The body would press down into the fabric, causing it to dimple. A marble rolled around the edge would spiral inward toward the body, pulled in much the same way that the gravity of a planet pulls at rocks in space.
The award is presented by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and is worth 10 million Swedish kronor (£864,200). This would be shared between the three of them, with one half going to Penrose, and the other half jointly between Genzel and Ghez. Andrea Ghez is the fourth woman in history to receive the physics Nobel prize.