Last week, the 2020 Physics Nobel Prize was awarded to three researchers – half of it to Roger Penrose, and the other half jointly awarded to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez (the fourth woman to earn the physics Nobel Prize!). Everyone in the astro community was thrilled that it has now been 2 years in a row that the physics Nobel Prize goes to space-related areas, first exoplanet research in 2019, and now in 2020 to black hole research!
Here’s a brief breakdown of their black hole research:
In the 1960s, Roger Penrose used theoretical physics to prove that black holes can form, and he described their nature in detail with mathematical models. Only a decade after Einstein passed away, Roger Penrose showed how the formation of black holes was a direct result of Einstein’s own general theory of relativity, groundbreaking research that has been reaffirmed observationally many times in the following decades (including the picture of a black hole up above).
The research from Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez is observational rather than theoretical physics, and has focused on the center of our very own Milky Way Galaxy. Their research teams have provided the most convincing evidence of the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Essentially, by pushing technology to its limit (making increasingly precise measurements, working around the Earths’ atmospheric distortion), they found that the stars closest to the center of the galaxy had incredibly fast, jumbled orbits that could only be explained by the presence an object four million solar masses cramped into a space the size of our Solar System. We now know that there are supermassive black holes at the center of almost every large galaxy, and there is research being done on how supermassive black holes evolve with their galaxies.
The research of these three scientists have pushed the field of black hole research to the next level, enlightening us on the nature and presence of these exotic celestial objects. I only gave a very brief overview, and there are tons of other resources online that go into much greater depth on their pioneering research. If you’re curious and keen to learn more, I’ve included some resources below that would be excellent places to start!
Nobel Prize website, with information on the research and a video of the Nobel Prize announcement: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/summary/
BCC announcement of the Nobel Prize winners: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54420240
Here are scientific papers on their research (not for light reading, but definitively worth looking over and incredibly detailed):
The singularities of gravitational collapse and cosmology by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.1970.0021
Observations of stellar proper motions near the Galactic Centre by A. Eckhart and R. Genzel: https://www.nature.com/articles/383415a0
Measuring Distance and Properties of the Milky Way’s Central Supermassive Black Hole with Stellar Orbits by Ghez et al.: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0808.2870.pdf
Author: Amélie Sharples