So finally, the Nobel Prize in physics for 2020 was announced. Three Laureates named Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez was the proud scientist who got this opportunity. Roger Penrose showed that the general theory of relativity leads to the formation of black holes. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy.
So
you can imagine that someone like me who does research in this area in this
field of supermassive black holes. I was absolutely elated at the news. I was
so excited and it really is just a win that's being claimed by the entirety of the
astronomy and astrophysics community. It's been a long-running joke in astronomy
over the past decade that Nobel Prize you know they're not bothered about
astronomy because the last one was sort of in 2006 or something and then bam
two years in a row 2019, astronomy for exoplanets and now 2020 astronomy for
black holes.
All right! so this prize is shared between the theoretical and the observational side of things and that's becoming quite commonplace for the Nobel Prize.
You know someone would do the mathematics and the theory back in the 20th century. In this case, all the way back in the 60’s and then as our technology improves into the 21st century. We can then do the observations or the experiment that then proves that mass in that theory. The prediction that was made back in the 20th century and that's exactly what happened here.
Previous work awarded now:
So Sir Roger Penrose has been
awarded the Nobel Prize for work he did back in the 60s' and 70’s with none
other than Stephen Hawking. They used Einstein's theory of general relativity i.e.
a mathematical description for how we think gravity behaves in our universe and
they used it to predict that a black hole should exist i.e. a point in space
where the gravity of an object was so strong that it collapsed in on itself to
give you this point of infinite density. It's something that's now called a singularity.
Now back then the idea of a black hole you know an object so dense that not
even light is traveling fast enough to escape was just sort of a theoretical curiosity
Or a mathematical curiosity. You know it wasn't considered a real object but
what Penrose and Hawking did was essentially show that mathematically; they were
inevitable in our universe and if we had the mass of gravity right then. We
should expect to see these things well, you might be wondering why Hawking and
Penrose didn't win the prize. Sooner since we've known of the existence of black
holes; now for a very long time well as I said the Nobel prize committee likes
his theory to be observationally or experimentally confirmed before awarding
the prize. So for example Einstein in 1916 predicted gravitational waves and it
wasn't until 2017 that the award was made for the detection of those
gravitational waves. Another example is
Peter Higgs predicting the Higgs Boson back in the 60’s and the Nobel Prize wasn't
awarded again until the 21st century when that detection was actually made.
What I think has triggered the Nobel prize committee this year to award it to black holes. It was that incredible image we had last year in 2019, the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole in the center of the messier 87 galaxies. This image was made possible by a huge team of people worldwide bringing together a huge array of radio telescopes to see something so far away and you might be wondering then why did the event horizon collaboration team not win the Nobel prize?
Major
discovery:
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