Nobel Prize 🏆 in physics 2020

 The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced the recipients of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, which has been awarded for discoveries about black holes, one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe. This year’s prize is awarded to Roger Penrose (University of Oxford), Reinhard Genzel (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, and University of California, Berkeley), and Andrea Ghez (University of California, Los Angeles). Genzel and Ghez are both APS Fellows. Ghez is also the fourth woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics, joining Marie Curie, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, and Donna Strickland.

One half of the Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to Penrose “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.” The other half is awarded jointly to Genzel and Ghez “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy.” Together, their discoveries were groundbreaking, proving black holes can exist within the framework of Einstein’s theory of relativity and that one does exist at the center of the Milky Way.