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The Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm has announced who will receive the Nobel Prize in Physics this year: half of the award goes to Britain’s Roger Penrose and the other half to German Reinhard Genzel and American scientist Andrea Ghez. All researchers have the honor of working on black holes.
The highest prize for physicists this year is endowed with a total of ten million crowns (about 950,000 euros), one million crowns more than last year.
Genzel was born in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe in 1952 and today he is director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, near Munich. He and Ghez (born 1965) independently discovered a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy in the 1990s.
The two researchers 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.
Fourth woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
Roger Penrose (born 1931) receives the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that the formation of black holes is a strong prediction of general relativity.
The Nobel Committee announced that it invented ingenious mathematical methods to investigate Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Penrose has shown that the theory leads to the formation of black holes, those monsters in time and space that capture everything that comes close to them.
With Ghez, there is also a woman among the physics award winners, the fourth to be honored with the award. With Marie Curie (1903 and 1911), Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1963) and Donna Strickland (2018), only three women had previously received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Curie received the Nobel Prize for the investigation of radioactivity and the discovery of the elements polonium and radium, Goeppert-Mayer devised the shell model of the atomic nucleus. Strickland received the award because he made significant progress in laser physics. So far, twelve women have received the Nobel Prize in Medicine and five in Chemistry.
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded since 1901. The German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen received the first prize for his discovery of “X-rays”, later named in his honor. Since then, 212 researchers have received the award. 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 the Swiss Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who discovered the first exoplanet orbiting a star similar to the sun (read more here).
Nobel Prize in Medicine for Hepatitis C Researchers
On Monday, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to virologists Harvey J. Alter (US), Michael Houghton (Great Britain) and Charles M. Rice (US). According to the Nobel Committee, they made a significant contribution to the detection and elimination of the hepatitis C virus. The resulting blood tests and medication would have saved the lives of millions of people (read more here).
The winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be announced on Wednesday. The next day, this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was announced. On Friday it will be announced who will receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. The show ends next Monday with the Nobel Prize in Economics donated by the Swedish Reichsbank.
The award ceremony is traditionally held on December 10, the anniversary of the death of the donor of the Alfred Nobel Prize. However, due to the corona pandemic, the award ceremony was canceled and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo will take place on a smaller scale.
