Nobel Prize in Physics 2020

  • Awarded to three astrophysicists Roger Penrose from the UK, Reinhard Genzel from Germany, and Andrea Ghez from the USA.

WHAT FOR?
  • Roger Penrose received half of this year’s prize for the discovery that a black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.
  • The theory explains gravity, as objects try to follow a straight line through a universe whose geometry is warped by matter and energy. As a result, planets, as well as light beams, follow curving paths.
  • Genzel and Ghez received the second half of the prize for the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milkyway galaxy, now known to be the Sagittarius A*.
  • It has a mass four million times that of the Sun and is confined to an area roughly the size of our Solar System.

BLACK HOLE
  • The term ‘black hole’ was coined in the mid-1960s by American Physicist John Archibald Wheeler.
  • Black hole refers to a point in space where matter is so compressed as to create a gravity field from which even light cannot escape.
  • Black-holes were theorized by Albert Einstein in 1915.
NOBEL IN PHYSICS 
  •  Nobel Prizes were established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895 and have been awarded since 1901.
  • The Nobel Prize in Physics is given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
  • The first Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to physicist Wilhelm Röntgen in recognition of the extraordinary services he rendered by the discovery of X-rays. 
  • India received its first Nobel Prize in physics in 1930, when scientist Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was awarded “for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him”. 
  • This phenomenon is now known as Raman Effect.
  • Indian physicist Subramanyan Chandrasekhar was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with physicist William Alfred Fowler. 
  • He was awarded “for theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars”.

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