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.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 with one half to Roger Penrose (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 (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”.
Roger Penrose showed that the general theory of relativity leads to the formation of black holes. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy. A supermassive black hole is the only currently known explanation.
The Dean of the department Ehud Behar was interviewed on “Kan Bet” and “i24 NEWS” and talked about the physics behind the 2020 Nobel: “We’ve been gathering hints about black holes for about 50 years one piece after the other... Ghez and Genzel have been following the stars orbiting the supermassive black hole in our galaxy and collecting evidence that black holes are real. We believe now that every galaxy has a supermassive black hole”. “These spectacular images that Ghez and Genzel collected for more than 20 years show the stars around the black hole, but not the black hole itself (since it’s not active)... It gives rise to very interesting questions about how the galaxies evolve, how does the black hole evolve, do they evolve together, do they affect each other..”
“The theory tells us that the black hole loses its memory of what it sucked in and basically you’re left with a very massive, highly concentrated region in space, which Roger Penrose termed the “closed trapped surface”, and the question of whether we can figure out, or measure, or have any access to what goes on inside the black hole is fascinating. Interestingly, if you go back in time to the big bang, you end up with something very small, very dense, and in many ways that Penrose wrote about, resembles those closed surfaces of black holes.”
- The Nobel prize press release:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/press-release/
- Interview with Adi Nusser (Arabic):
Link to ashams.com
- Interview with Prof. Ehud Behar on “Kan Bet”:
https://www.ifatmediasite.com/VT/Trans.aspx?ID=10204573&CID=102234
- Interview with Prof. Ehud Behar on “i24 NEWS”:
https://www.facebook.com/calev.bendavid/videos/10159004076334853