Roger Penrose of Britain, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and Andrea Ghez of the US won the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday for their research on black holes.
The physicists were selected “for their discoveries about one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe, the black hole,” the Nobel Committee said.
Andrea Ghez is just the fourth woman to receive the physics prize since 1901, when the first Nobel prizes were handed out.
Penrose, 89, was honoured for showing “that the general theory of relativity leads to the formation of black holes”, while Genzel, 68, and Ghez, 55, were jointly awarded for discovering “that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy.”
Penrose used mathematical modelling to prove back in 1965 that black holes can form, becoming an entity from which nothing, not even light, may escape. Genzel and Ghez have led research since the early 1990s focusing on a region called Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Milky Way.
Using the world’s largest telescopes, they discovered an extremely heavy, invisible object — around 4 million times greater than the mass of our Sun — that pulls on surrounding stars, giving our galaxy its characteristic swirl.
The in-person ceremony has been cancelled this year due to the Covid pandemic.
India’s first Nobel Prize for Physics was claimed in 1930 by physicist Sir CV Raman. Recipient of many honours and awards, including the title of ‘Sir’, he received the Nobel Prize for an optics research, wherein he discovered that diffused light contained rays of other wavelengths-what is now popularly known as Raman Effect. His theory discovered in 1928 explains the change in the frequency of light passing through a transparent medium.
Yesterday, Nobel Prize for
medicine was awarded. Read here:
https://hellotricity.in/nobel-prize-2020/
