admin The study of black holes was felicitated with the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics on 6th October, Tuesday. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences conferred half of the ten million Swedish kronor prize upon Roger Penrose, and the other half was jointly conferred upon Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez. Roger Penrose has been awarded the prize for his invaluable contribution to mathematically proving the existence of black holes as a consequence of the general relativity theory. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were honoured for jointly contributing to the discovery of the black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Roger Penrose is affiliated to the Oxford University, while Reinhard Genzel is associated with the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and Ghez is a professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California.
What is a Black Hole?
A star collapsing into itself- due to the weight of its own gravitational force- leads to the formation of a black hole in the universe. The time-space continuum stands altered in a black hole. Physicists believe that nothing escapes a black hole as its escape velocity is exceptionally strong for any object to counter the massive gravitational pull.
Interstellar Legacy
In 1965, by instrumentalizing Einstein’s theory of Relativity, Penrose was able to descriptively demonstrate the existence of black holes. He was able to prove that the process of black hole creation is a stable one. The contribution of Penrose’s paper was invaluable as it helped pave the way for future research in the field of black holes. However, the possibility of observing black holes remained theoretical due to the absence of angular telescopes. It was only with the use of Infrared telescopes and Adaptive Optics-by Genzel and Ghez in their 1990s experiments- which enabled effective observations of these black holes.
Through their experiments, Genzel and Ghez essentially proved a long-standing suspicion among physicists- the existence of an invisible supermassive object in the center of our galaxy. Their research was instrumental in the discovery of an invisible object located in the center of our galaxy, possessing a gravitational force much stronger than the sun. Using the most sophisticated and advanced telescopes, they conducted research in the Sagittarius A* region of the Milky Way galaxy. To ensure accuracy of calculations, a technique termed as Speckled Imaging was developed. This was substantiated with Adaptive Optics to overcome the atmospheric distortions in the imaging of stars.
A Giant Leap Forward
Their joint contributions to the study of black holes have been monumental as the very first image of a black hole was released in 2019. This marked a giant leap forward for astrophysics in terms of discovering answers to the unknown. The pandemic has caused the in-person Nobel Prize ceremony to be cancelled and replaced by a televised version of the same, to be held on 10th December, 2020. This date marks the death anniversary of Alfred Nobel- the creator of the coveted Nobel Prize.
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