The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020

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The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020

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Highlights – 

1. Three scientists have won the Nobel Prize in physics for establishing the all-too-weird reality of black holes — the straight-out-of-science-fiction cosmic monsters that suck up light and time and will eventually swallow us, too.
2. Roger Penrose of Britain, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and Andrea Ghez of the United States explained to the world these dead ends of the cosmos that are still not completely understood but are deeply connected, somehow, to the creation of galaxies.
3. Penrose, an 89-year-old at the University of Oxford, received half of the prize for proving with mathematics in 1964 that Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted the formation of black holes, even though Einstein himself didn’t think they existed.
4. Genzel, who is at both the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the University of California, Berkeley, and Ghez, of the University of California, Los Angeles, received the other half of the prize for discovering in the 1990s a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
5. While the three scientists showed the existence of black holes, it wasn’t until last year that people could see one for themselves when another science team captured the first and only optical image of one.
6. It looks like a flaming doughnut from hell but is in a galaxy 53 million light-years from Earth.
7. What fascinated Penrose more than the black hole was what was at the other end of it, something called the “singularity.” It’s something science still can’t figure out. Singularity, that’s a place where the densities and curvatures go to infinity.
8. Martin Rees, the British astronomer royal, noted that Penrose triggered a “renaissance” in the study of relativity in the 1960s, and that, together with a young Stephen Hawking, he helped firm up evidence for the Big Bang and black holes.
9. In the 1990s, Genzel and Ghez, leading separate groups of astronomers, trained their sights on the dust-covered center of our Milky Way galaxy, a region called Sagittarius A(asterisk), where something strange was going on. 
10. It was “an extremely heavy, invisible object that pulls on the jumble of stars, causing them to rush around at dizzying speeds.”
11. It was a black hole. Not just an ordinary black hole, but a supermassive one, 4 million times the mass of our sun.

Important details – 

1. The Nobel comes with a gold medal and 10 million kronor (more than $1.1 million), courtesy of a bequest left 124 years ago by the prize’s creator, Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.
2. Recently, the Nobel in medicine was awarded to Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus.

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