Nobel Prize in Physics honours work on black holes

TODAY, we have come to accept the idea of black holes, from the insides of which nothing, not even light, can escape. Sixty-eight-year-old Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany, and 55-year-old Andrea Ghez of the University of California at Los Angeles share the other half of the prize for their experiments that provided the observational evidence of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the earth’s galaxy, the Milky Way. In the very year after he formulated the theory, the German astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild found a solution to Einstein’s equations of GTR which implied that, as a spherically symmetric object collapses under its own gravitational pull, there exists an “event horizon”, a characteristic radius associated with every quantity of mass at which the matter falling inwards under collapse will be totally cut off from observers outside that radius. As the theorist Vitor Cardoso of the Technical University of Lisbon told the online news letter Physics of the American Institute of Physics: “The evidence is so overwhelming that a black hole is the least exotic explanation for the object sitting there.” In fact, since quasars were discovered, physicists have argued that most large galaxies would be harbouring supermassive black holes. As mentioned in the beginning of the article, in April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope network succeeded in imaging the immediate vicinity of a supermassive black hole located deep inside the galaxy known as Messier 87, 55 million light years away from the earth, which, as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences press note on the Nobel award said, “is a blacker than black eye surrounded by a ring of fire”.