The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded on October 6th 2020 to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy, together with Roger Penrose for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.
This is the second consecutive year that the prestigious award honours research in Astronomy.
The Astronet network would like to congratulate the three laureates, of which Reinhard Genzel, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, and Roger Penrose, professor at Oxford University, are European astrophysicist. Renihard Genzel and his team have conducted observations of Sagittarius A* for nearly 30 years using a fleet of instruments on European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes and is a prime user of European observatories such as IRAM (Institut de RadioAstronomie Millimétrique) for his research. Roger Penrose has established the theoretical ground for the formation of black holes in the framework of general relativity and is one of the main figures of European theoretical physics and astrophysics. Both highlight the wide range of expertises of European astronomy.
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