Black hole heroes win 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded jointly to three scientists who made discoveries about black holes.

Nobel committee scientists said this year’s prize celebrates one of the most exotic objects in the universe: black holes, which have become a staple of science fiction and science fact where time even seems to stand still.

Briton Roger Penrose was awarded half of the prize “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity,” the committee said.

He proved with mathematics that the formation of black holes was possible, based heavily on Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity

The other half of the prize is to be split between German Reinhard Genzel and American Andrea Ghez “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy”, the committee said. That object is a black hole four million times the mass of our sun.