This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was jointly awarded to two American and one German researchers for their work on one of the most mysterious objects in the Universe: a black hole. This comes just a year after the world saw the first image of a supermassive black hole captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of telescopes to create one the size of Earth.
Half of the award went to the American mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose, who in 1965 proved that Einstein’s theory of relativity led to the formation of black holes that engulf everything, including light due to massive gravitational attraction. Even Albert Einstein didn’t think that black holes could really exist.
To show that black hole formation is a stable process, Penrose needed to expand the methods used to study the theory of relativity with new mathematical concepts. It is still considered the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.
Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Glasgow used a ring of speakers and a sound-absorbing disk to practically demonstrate how energy can be obtained from a black hole as predicted by Penrose in 1969.
The other half of the award was shared by German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel and American astronomer Andrea M Ghez, whose groups have focused on a region called Sagittarius A * in the center of the Milky Way.
With this, Ghez became the fourth woman to receive the award since 1901 when it was first presented. The other three are Donna Strickland, who got it in 2018, Maria Geopperts-Mayer in 1963, and Marie Curie in 1903. Curie is also the only woman and one of four people to have received a second Nobel Prize; received the Chemistry award in 1911.
By mapping the orbits of the brightest stars in the region, both groups observed that there was something invisible and heavy that was forcing the stars to rotate. This object has a mass of four million suns compressed into a region no larger than our solar system. According to current theory of gravity, there is only one candidate that fits the description: a supermassive black hole.
“The discoveries of this year’s laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects. But these exotic objects still raise many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research. Not only questions about its internal structure, but also questions about how to test our theory of gravity under extreme conditions in the vicinity of a black hole, “said David Haviland, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics in a statement.
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