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Three scientists win Nobel Prize for Physics 2020 for their crucial discoveries!

By alagu, 06 October, 2020
Nobel Prize, Science, Physics

On the second day of the Nobel Prize week, the award-giving body had announced the Nobel Prize for Physics and this year's recognition has been tagged for the significance of the discovery as the prestigious award has been conferred for three scientists for their discoveries about the black-hole, which is one of the mystic subjects of the universe, which the humankind is still far away from unveiling the complete facts of the perplexing phenomenon. 

Three scientists - Roger Penrose from Britain, Andrea Ghez from the United States, Reinhard Genzel of Germany have been bestowed with the award on Tuesday. The award is presented by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and is worth 10 million Swedish Kronor ($1 million) and the pack of the money will be shared among the winners, with half going to Penrose and the other half shared by Genzel and Ghez. 

Roger Penrose, a British mathametical physicist based at the University of Oxford, won half of the share for using ingenious mathematical tools to prove that the formation of black holes are predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity whereas Genzel and Ghez will be sharing the other half of the prize money between them. 

According to Reuters, Genzel, of the Max Plank Institute and University of California, Berkeley, and Ghez, at the University of California, Los Angeles had shared the other half for discovering that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the center of our galaxy, and after being conferred with the Nobel Prize, UCLA's Andrea Ghez has become the fourth woman to win the physics prize while the other three being Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963, and Donna Strickland in 2018. 

 

The award-giving body had said they have been conferred for their discoveries about one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe. Speaking about the bestowment, David Haviland, the chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics said, "The discoveries of this year's laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects". 

Haviland further stated, "These exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research". After becoming the four woman to get conferred with the Nobel Prize of Physics, Andrea Ghez said she was thrilled to receive the award. She said, "I hope I can inspire other young women into the field. It is  a field that has so many pleasures, and if you are passionate about the science there is so much that can be done". 

Black holes are something that still make the scientists to lose their sleep to understand its entirety, which could unleash more secrets about the universe. Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong which don't even spare the lights as it sucks the objects into it. Through the discovery, British physicist Roger Penrose had shown that the black holes are an inevitable consequence of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. 

According to Ulf Danielsson, one of the members of the Nobel Committee, Penrose had laid the theoratical foundations to say that these objects exist and you can expect to find them if you go out and look for them whereas Genzel and Ghez had provided the most convincing evidence of a supermassive black hole at the center of Milky way, which is our galaxy. 

While Nobel Peace Prize will be announced in Norway, the prizes for rest of the fields will be announced n Sweden. In what has become a Nobel week, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was announced on October 5 while Nobel Prize for Physics has now been announced on October 6, Chemistry on October 7, Literature on October 8, Peace on October 9, and Economics on October 10. About 211 individuals and 107 organizations have been nominated for the various fields of Nobel Prize 2020. 

 

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