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Half of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics goes to the British Penrose and the other half to the German Genzel and the American Ghez. All three have done research on black holes.
Half of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Roger Penrose from Great Britain and the other half to Reinhard Genzel from Germany and Andrea Ghez from the United States for their research on black holes. This was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Genzel is director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, near Munich.
Penrose receives the award for discovering that the formation of black holes is a strong prediction of general relativity. Genzel and Ghez, in turn, are honored for their discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy.
Ingenious mathematical methods
Penrose invented ingenious mathematical methods to investigate Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, announced the Nobel Committee. He has shown that this theory leads to the formation of black holes, those monsters in time and space that capture everything that comes close to them. Genzel and Ghez discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object dominates the orbits of the stars in the center of our galaxy. A supermassive black hole is the only currently known explanation for this.
After the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, the prize from the Department of Physics is the second Nobel Prize awarded this year. Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to the Canadian-American cosmologist James Peebles to learn about the evolution of the universe and to the Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who discovered the first exoplanet to orbit a star similar to the sun.
In the tradition of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen
The Nobel Prize in Physics, like the prizes for medicine, chemistry, literature and peace efforts, has been awarded since 1901. Its founder, the Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Nobel, had died five years earlier. In his will he had decreed that a foundation be created out of his assets, the interest of which was paid to those who made the greatest and most useful inventions and discoveries the year before.
The first Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the German Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1901 for the discovery of “X-rays”, the X-rays that later received his name. The last time a German won the Nobel Prize in Physics was in 2007: Peter Grünberg from the Jülich Research Center of the Helmholtz Association was honored together with the Frenchman Albert Fert for his contributions to the research of the giant magnetoresistance, which is used to read computer hard drives. .
