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This was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Roger Penrose mathematically proved that black holes are a consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez discovered an invisible and extremely heavy object in the center of the Milky Way, which until now can only be explained as a black hole.
At the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, near Munich, of which Reinhard Genzel has been director since 1986, the award was a great pleasure. The award is a great honor for the institute, its secretary said Tuesday. The phone has not stopped since. A press conference with Genzel is scheduled for the afternoon at the Garching institute. The fact that he was to receive the Nobel Prize this year “was a surprise,” added a spokeswoman for the Max Planck Institute.
The researchers provided the “most compelling evidence to date” for the existence of a black hole.
British mathematician and physicist Penrose received half of the award, while astronomers Andrea Ghez from the United States and Reinhard Genzel shared the other half. This year the Nobel Prize is endowed with ten million Swedish crowns (about 950,000 euros), one million more than the previous year.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is about the “darkest secrets of our galaxy,” said Göran Hansson of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences when announcing this year’s winners. The center of the Milky Way is really dark and hard to see. Interstellar dust blocks view. Genzel and Ghez had to rely on the world’s largest telescopes to see anything there. They developed extremely complex methods to recognize the outline of an object that is likely to be a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Physicists talk about Sagittarius A *.
According to the academy, the discoveries made by the two researchers represent “the most compelling evidence to date” for the existence of a black hole. Only last year the first photo of a black hole caused a sensation around the world. However, it does not come from the Milky Way, but from the Messier 87 galaxy, which is more than 50 million light years away.
Andrea Ghez is only the fourth woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics
Reinhard Genzel was born in Bad Homburg in 1952, studied physics at the University of Bonn and received his doctorate in 1978 at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. He then went to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1986, Genzel has been director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, near Munich. De Garching teaches at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.
Andrea Mia Ghez is only the fourth woman to be honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics. So you’re in a row with Marie Curie, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, and Donna Strickland. Like many other Nobel laureates, the American, born in 1965, began her career at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and is now a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ghez and Genzel made their discoveries independently in the 1990s.
Roger Penrose, born 1931, is best known to the public for his books on philosophical questions in mathematics and physics. In his scientific work he was based on Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Using mathematical tools, he showed that Einstein’s theory directly implies that black holes must arise in the universe. Einstein himself did not believe in the real existence of such holes. The idea of black holes actually sounds a bit mystical at first: they swallow everything that comes close to them and a supposed singularity lurks at their center, where all known laws of nature lose their validity. However, just ten years after Einstein’s death, Penrose used new mathematical methods to show that these black holes must exist. According to the Academy, his article, published in 1965, remains the most important contribution to Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
The presentation of the Nobel Prizes this year will be less than usual
The first Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1901 for the discovery of the X-rays that bear his name. Since then, 212 more scientists have been recognized in this category. Last year, James Peebles (Canada / USA) received half the Nobel Prize in Physics for his fundamental discoveries about the development of the universe. The other was for Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (both from Switzerland), who discovered the first exoplanet orbiting a star similar to the sun.
This year, the week of the Nobel Prize Announcements began on Monday with the announcement of the winners in the medicine category. On this occasion, the award is shared by Harvey J. Alter (USA), Michael Houghton (Great Britain) and Charles M. Rice (USA), who are honored for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus.
The awarding of all Nobel Prizes on December 10, the anniversary of the death of prize donor and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, will be much smaller this time than usual due to the crown. Winners will likely receive their certificates and medals on their countries of origin, in a Swedish embassy or in their respective universities. .
