[ad_1]
The discovery that the formation of black holes “is the robust prediction of the Theory of General Relativity”, led the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to award the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics to the British mathematician Roger Penrose, a researcher at the University from Oxford (UK). ). The Nobel Prize is awarded to Reinhard Genzel, a German astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Garching, Germany), and Andrea Ghez, an American astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, also due to the discovery of “a compact object. supermassive in the center of our galaxy that governs the orbits of the stars ”, underlines a statement from the Swedish Academy.
The institution considers black holes “one of the most exotic phenomena in the Universe” and notes that Roger Penrose used ingenious mathematical methods in his demonstration that black holes are a direct consequence of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. “Einstein himself did not believe that black holes really existed, those super-heavy monsters that capture everything that enters them and where nothing can escape, not even light,” says the Swedish Academy. In January 1965, ten years after Einstein’s death, Roger Penrose showed that even black holes can form and that “they hide a singularity in which all known laws of nature cease.”
Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez lead teams of astronomers who have been investigating a region of the sky called Sagittarius A * in the center of the Milky Way since the early 1990s. Astronomers have mapped the orbits of the closest bright stars and the Measurements by the two research groups have led to the discovery of an extremely heavy invisible object that pulls on stars and makes them orbit at breakneck speeds. In such a way that it unites about four million solar masses in a region of Space of the dimension of the Solar System.
“This year’s awardees’ findings broke 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,” said David Haviland, chairman of the Nobel Committee on Physics. Questions about the structure of these objects and “how to test the theory of gravity in extreme conditions in the vicinity of a black hole”.
Meanwhile, the Nobel Prize in Physics has increased this year to SEK 10 million, about € 954,000, half of which is attributed to Roger Penrose and the other half is shared between Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez.
