Updated: October 6, 2020 8:22:04 pm
The three winners on the left screen, Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez have won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries of black holes. (AP)
On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided to award half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics to Roger Penrose and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for promoting understanding of black holes, the most “enigmatic” objects in the world. universe.
Earlier Monday, three biologists shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the vaccine for the hepatitis C virus.
So what are black holes?
A black hole forms when stars collapse and can be defined as a space in the universe with an escape velocity so strong that not even light can escape.
Escape velocity is the speed at which an object must travel to annul a planet or the gravitational force of an object. For example, for a spacecraft to leave the surface of the Earth, it must travel at a speed of about 40,000 km per hour.
BREAKING NEWS:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award 2020 #Nobel Prize in Physics with half for Roger Penrose and the other half jointly for Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez. pic.twitter.com/MipWwFtMjz– The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2020
Since light cannot get out, black holes are invisible and can only be tracked with the help of a space telescope or other special tools. And the reason that light cannot escape is mainly because the gravity inside a black hole is very strong as a result of a large amount of matter compressed into a small space.
So what does the award winners’ work on black holes tell us?
Penrose has received the award for the discovery “that the formation of a black hole is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity”, while Genzel and Ghez have received the award for the discovery of a “supermassive compact object in the center of our galaxy. ” . “
Penrose’s work has shown that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Einstein himself did not believe that black holes existed and presented his theory in November 1915, providing a new way of seeing and understanding gravity that shapes the universe “on the largest scale.” Gravity also shapes space and influences the passage of time. It is this gravity that is so large inside a black hole that it can bend space and slow down time.
Penrose used Einstein’s theory of general relativity to show that the process of black hole formation is stable. She proved that black holes exist and described them in detail in 1965, ten years after Einstein’s death.
Genzel and Ghez, on the other hand, have discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbit of the stars in the center of the Milky Way. This extremely heavy object has a mass equivalent to 4 million solar masses and is packed into an area the size of our solar system.
Essentially, their work tells us that at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is an invisible supermassive object, for which a black hole provides a reasonable explanation. Physicists have suspected the existence of a black hole at the center of our galaxy for more than 50 years.
To see through the Milky Way, Genzel and Ghez worked on developing methods and used some of the largest telescopes in the world.
By looking at the orbits of the stars closest to the center of the Milky Way, physicists think that the black hole could probably be hidden in Sagitarrius A *, a source of radio waves around which all the stars in the Milky Way orbit. . . In other words, the existence of a black hole at the center of our galaxy is what physicists believe is what attracts a “jumble of stars”, causing them to “run at breakneck speeds.”
Where does black hole research go from here?
Although the work carried out by Penrose has established that black holes are a “robust” consequence of the theory of relativity and that they form naturally in very overdense regions, which shows that their formation is a stable process, the theory ceases to be applied in the center. of the black hole called the singularity – “a limit at which all known laws of nature break.” This essentially means that the extent to which the theory of general relativity applies to the structure of black holes requires further probing and questions remain about the internal structure of black holes.
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