THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS 2020 - Black holes and the Milky Way’s darkest secret - Three Laureates

Oct 20, 2026

Narrative overview of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, focusing on discoveries related to black holes. It explains how Roger Penrose linked black hole formation to general relativity, while Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez mapped stellar orbits at the Milky Way’s centre, revealing an invisible, extremely massive object. The text describes event horizons, singularities, gravity’s role in shaping space and time, and the cultural and historical development of black-hole concepts.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages8

Reading Time20 min

AccessFree to download

Black holes and the Milky Way’s darkest secret

Three laureates and their discoveries

A breakthrough beyond Einstein

Gravity holds the universe in its grip

A solution beyond perfection

The mystery of quasars

THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS 2020 POPULA R SCIENCE BACKGROUND Nobel Prize® is a registered t rademark of the Nobel Foundat ion . Black holes and the Milky Way’s darkest secret Three Laureates share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their discoveries about one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe, the black hole. Roger Penrose showed that black holes are a direct consequence of the general theory of relativity. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the stars’ orbits at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. A supermassive black hole is the only currently known explanation. Roger Penrose invented ingenious mathematical methods to explore Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He showed that the theory leads to the formation of black holes, those monsters in time and space that capture everything that enters them. Nothing, not even light, can escape. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez each lead a group of astronomers who have focused on a region at the centre of the Milky Way since the early 1990s. With increasing precision, they have mapped the orbits of the brightest stars that are closest to the centre. Both groups found something that is both invisible and heavy, forcing this jumble of stars to swirl around. This invisible mass has about four million solar masses squeezed together in a region no larger than our solar system. What is it that makes the stars at the heart of the Milky Way swing around at such astonishing speeds? According to the current theory of gravity, there is only one candidate – a supermassive black hole. A breakthrough beyond Einstein Not even Albert Einstein, the father of general relativity, thought that black holes could actually exist. However, ten years after Einstein’s death, the British theorist Roger Penrose demonstrated that black holes can form and described their properties. At their heart, black holes hide a singularity, a boundary at which all the known laws of nature break down. To prove that black hole formation is a stable process, Penrose needed to expand the methods used to study the theory of relativity – tackling the theory’s problems with new mathematical concepts. Penrose’s ground-breaking article was published in January 1965 and is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein. Gravity holds the universe in its grip Black holes are perhaps the strangest consequence of the general theory of relativity. When Albert Einstein presented his theory in November 1915, it upended all the previous concepts of space and time. The theory provided an entirely new foundation for understanding gravity, which shapes the universe at the largest scale. Since then, this theory has provided the basis for all studies of the universe, and also has a practical use in one of our most common navigation tools, the GPS. Einstein’s theory describes how everything and everyone in the universe is held in the grip of gravitation. Gravity holds us on Earth, it governs the orbits of the planets around the Sun and the orbit of the Sun around the centre of the Milky Way. It leads to the birth of stars from interstellar clouds, and eventually their death in a gravitational collapse. Gravitation brings shape to space and influences the passage of time. A heavy mass bends space and slows time; an extremely heavy mass can even cutoff and encapsulate a piece of space – forming a black hole. The first theoretical description of what we now call a black hole came just a few weeks after the publication of the general theory of relativity. Despite the theory’s extremely complicated mathematical equations, the German astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild was able to provide Einstein with a solution that described how heavy masses can bend space and time. Later studies showed that once a black hole has formed, it is surrounded by an event horizon that sweeps around th

FAQs

What discoveries did the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics recognize?

The prize recognized work explaining black holes: Penrose’s theoretical demonstration from general relativity, and Genzel and Ghez’s observations mapping stellar orbits governed by an unseen, extremely heavy object at the Milky Way’s centre.

Why can’t light escape a black hole?

In the general-relativity framework, a black hole forms an event horizon that traps everything that enters it, including light.

How did astronomers study the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way?

They tracked the orbits of bright stars near the centre with increasing precision, finding that an invisible, massive object must be present to force the observed motion.

Oct 20, 2026

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