On the 6th of October 2020 the Nobel Prize for Physics was announced by Professor Göran K. Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

What is the Nobel Prize for Physics and what is its significance?

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish inventor who held 355 different patents for his discoveries. In his will, he left a part of his wealth to be awarded to those people in the field of physics, chemistry, peace, literature and medicine/physiology who granted mankind with greater benefit. And so, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was entrusted with the duty of awarding the Prize for Physics, yearly.

This year, the Prize was awarded to three people. One half of the Prize is awarded to Roger Penrose, and the other half is shared by Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez .

This year the Prize was awarded for discoveries that led to a greater understanding of black holes. All of you have heard of gravity. Black holes are those regions of intense density in spacetime where gravity is so strong. Even light cannot escape from a black hole.

Roger Penrose is a mathematical physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science. He was born in 1931 at Essex. According to the Nobel Committee, he was awarded the Prize "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". He mathematically proved that black holes are inevitable based on Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Reinhard Genzel is a German astrophysicist born in 1952. He is from Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany and University of California, Berkeley, USA.  Andrea Ghez is an American astronomer and professor born in 1965. She is from University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Ghez is the fourth woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for physics. They were awarded the prize "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy."

Genzel and Ghez with their own teams observed the stars at the centre of our galaxy. They both understood that something strange was there. And after a lot of observations and calculations they found out the mass of the strange object to be 4 million times the mass of the Sun. And they understood that it was a supermassive black hole.

The winners will be awarded with a prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (more than $1.1 million), a gold medal and a diploma.