Reinhard Genzel
Facts
© Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Bernhard Ludewig
Reinhard Genzel
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020
Born: 24 March 1952, Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Germany
Affiliation at the time of the award: University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany
Prize motivation: "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy."
Prize share: 1/4
Work
Since nothing, not even light, can escape black holes, they can only be observed by the radiation and the movement of nearby objects. Since the 1990s, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez with their respective research teams, have developed and refined techniques for studying the movement of stars. Observations of stars in the area around Sagittarius A* in the middle of our galaxy, the Milky Way, revealed a super massive black hole.
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