The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to scientists Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for their discoveries about black holes.
This year’s prize was about “the darkest secrets of the universe,” said Göran K. Hansson, secretary for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said at Tuesday’s ceremony in Stockholm.
Penrose, a professor at the University of Oxford who worked with the late Stephen Hawking, showed that black holes must be a physical reality — proving Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Genzel and Ghez discovered a supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
“Penrose, Genzel and Ghez together showed us that black holes are awe-inspiring, mathematically sublime, and actually exist,” Tom McLeish, professor of natural philosophy at the University of York, told the Science Media Centre in London.
