Stockholm, Oct 6 (UNI) The 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics was on Tuesday awarded to Britain national Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and US scientist Andrea Ghez for their discovery of black holes in the universe.
Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from them.
As per the award body, half the prize has been awarded to Mr Penrose for his mathematical work in proving that black holes are a direct consequence of the general theory of relativity.
The other half of the prize was equally distributed by Ms Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute and University of California, Berkeley, and Mr Ghez, at the University of California, Los Angeles for discovering that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy.
The winners will share the prize money of 10 million kronor (£864,200).
David Haviland, chair of the physics prize committee, said this year's award "celebrates one of the most exotic objects in the Universe".
“The discoveries of this year’s Laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects,” he added.
Ms Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the physics prize, after Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018.
Swedish industrialist and chemist Alfred Nobel founded the prizes in his will, written in 1895 - a year before his death.
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