UPSC Articles
Nobel Prize In Physics 2020 announced
Part of: GS Prelims and GS-III – Science and technology; Space
In news
- Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 has been awarded, with one half to Roger Penrose and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for their discoveries about Black hole.
Key takeaways
- Roger Penrose used ingenious mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
- Reinhard Genzel and Andrea 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.
- Their pioneering work has given the humankind the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
Important value additions
Black Hole
- It is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing — no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light — can escape from it.
- The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole.
