STOCKHOLM/BERLIN, Oct 06 (Reuters): Britain's Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and American Andrea Ghez won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discoveries about one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe, the black hole, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.
Penrose, professor at the University of Oxford, won half the prize for his work using mathematics to prove that black holes are a direct consequence of the general theory of relativity.
Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute and University of California, Berkeley, and Ghez, at the University of California, Los Angeles, shared the other half for discovering that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy.
Ghez - only the fourth woman to be awarded the Physics prize after Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018 - said she hoped it would inspire other women to enter her field.
Asked about the discovery of a massive yet invisible object at the heart of the Milky Way, Ghez said "the first thing is doubt".
"You have to prove to yourself that what you are really seeing is what you think you are seeing. So, both doubt and excitement," she said in a call with the committee after receiving the award.
"It's that feeling of being at the frontier of research when you have to always question what you are seeing."
Scientists have wondered since the late 18th century whether any object existed in the universe that would exert a gravitational pull so strong that light may not be able to escape.
Nobel laureate Albert Einstein predicted in 1915, in his general theory of relativity, that space and time would be warped by the force of gravity.
But it was not until a seminal paper in 1965 that Penrose proved that black holes can really form.
Nobel Prize goes to trio
Black hole discoveries
FE Team | Published: October 06, 2020 23:49:53
Nobel Prize goes to trio
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