2020 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 6 October 2020.

The citation

Half of the prize goes to Roger Penrose "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". Half of the prize goes jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy".

The laureates

Roger Penrose was born in 1931 in Colchester, United Kingdom, and is affiliated with the University of Oxford, Oxford. Reinhard Genzel was born in 1952 in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Germany, and is affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching and the University of California, Berkeley. Andrea Ghez was born in 1965 in New York, the United States, and is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles.

Why it matters

Penrose used mathematics to show that black holes are a direct consequence of Einstein's theory of relativity. Genzel and Ghez found evidence for a giant black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Penrose, born in Colchester, is a professor at the University of Oxford.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.