One half of the award went to the American mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose who had in 1965 shown that Einstein’s theory of relativity led to the formation of black holes that engulf everything, including light because of the massive gravitational pull. Not even Albert Einstein thought that black holes could actually exist.

One half of the award went to the American mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose. The other half of the prize was shared by the German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel and American astronomer Andrea M Ghez whose groups have been focussing at a region called Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. (AGENCIES.)

One half of the award went to the American mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose who had in 1965 shown that Einstein’s theory of relativity led to the formation of black holes that engulf everything, including light because of the massive gravitational pull. Not even Albert Einstein thought that black holes could actually exist.

To prove that black hole formation is a stable process, Penrose needed to expand the methods used to study the theory of relativity with new mathematical concepts. It is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.

Earlier this year, researchers from Glasgow University used a ring of speakers and a sound-absorbing disk to practically demonstrate how energy can be obtained from a black hole as predicted by Penrose in 1969.

The other half of the prize was shared by the German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel and American astronomer Andrea M Ghez whose groups have been focussing at a region called Sagittarius A* at the centre of Milky Way galaxy.

With this, Ghez became the fourth woman to have received the award since 1901 when it was first given out. The other three are Donna Strickland who got it in 2018, Maria Geopperts-Mayer in 1963, and Marie Curie in 1903. Curie is also the only woman and one of four people to have received a second Nobel Prize; she received the Chemistry prize in 1911.

By mapping the orbits of the brightest stars in the region, both the groups observed that there was something both invisible and heavy forcing the stars to swirl around. This object has a mass of four million suns squeezed in a region not larger than our solar system. According to the current theory of gravity, there is only one candidate fitting the description – a supermassive black hole.

“The discoveries of this year’s Laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects. But these exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research. Not only questions about their inner structure, but also questions about how to test our theory of gravity under the extreme conditions in the immediate vicinity of a black hole”, said David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics in a release.