Three scientists have won the 2020 Nobel prize in physics for their work on black hole formation and the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
Sir Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez together scooped the 114th Nobel prize in physics.
The award, announced on Tuesday, is presented by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and is worth 10m Swedish kronor (£870,000), which will be shared among the winners, with half going to Penrose and the other half shared between Genzel and Ghez.
Mysterious, exciting and inescapable, black holes form when an enormous mass is squashed into a small space, as occurs when massive stars collapse. The result is an object where gravity is so strong that a one-way street is formed; not even light can escape, meaning black holes are invisible, while to distant observers time appears to stand still in the region surrounding it that is known as the event horizon.
Prof Penrose, a British mathematical physicist based at the University of Oxford, won his share of the prize for using innovative mathematical techniques to prove that the formation of black holes is an inevitable consequence of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and hence can truly exist.
