NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS
WHY IN NEWS?
- The Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 2020 was awarded to three astrophysicists Roger Penrose from the UK, Reinhard Genzel from Germany, and Andrea Ghez from the USA.
. KEY POINTS
- Roger Penrose received half of this year’s prize for the discovery that a black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.
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- Black holes were one of the first and most extreme predictions of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity which came in 1915.
- The theory explains gravity, as objects try to follow a straight line through a universe whose geometry is warped by matter and energy. As a result, planets, as well as light beams, follow curving paths.
- Dr Penrose proved that if too much mass accumulated in too small a place, collapse into a black hole was inevitable. At the boundary of a black hole, called the event horizon, one would have to go faster than the speed of light to escape it, which is impossible. At the centre of a black hole, where the density became infinite, the laws of physics, would no longer apply.
- Genzel and Ghez received the second half of the prize for the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milkyway galaxy, now known to be the Sagittarius A*.
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- It has a mass four million times that of the Sun and is confined to an area roughly the size of our Solar System.
- In 2019, scientists got the first optical image of a black hole which is at the centre of the Messier 87 galaxy.
- Sagittarius A* is the second black hole whose photographs have been captured by the Event Horizon Telescope project. It is yet to be released.
- Dr. Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, following Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018