Srinagar: Three scientists from the US, the UK and Germany have been awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize 2020 in Physics.
A press release by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that it had decided to award the Nobel Prize 2020 in Physics to Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, UK “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity” and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany and University of California, Berkeley, USA and Andrea Ghez
University of California, Los Angeles, USA “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy”.
Penrose was born in the UK while Ghez and Genzel hail from the US and Germany respectively.
As per the Royal Academy statement, the three Laureates share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their discoveries about one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe, the black hole.
While Penrose showed that the general theory of relativity leads to the formation of black holes, Genzel and Ghez discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy, the statement read.
It said a supermassive black hole is the only currently known explanation.

The Royal Swedish Academy further said that Penrose used ingenious mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
It further said that Genzel and Ghez each lead a group of astronomers that, since the early 1990s, has focused on a region called Sagittarius A* at the centre of our galaxy.

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