About the Prize

Half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Roger Penrose for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.

In 1957 Penrose, then a graduate student, met Georgia Tech’s late David Ritz Finkelstein in a fateful meeting that changed both men’s lives forever after. It was Finkelstein’s extension of the Schwarzschild metric which provided Penrose with an opening into general relativity and set him on the path to his 1965 discovery celebrated by this year’s prize.

The other half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for the discovery of — in Ghez’s words — "The Monster at the heart of the Milky Way," a black hole whose existence had been hypothesized since the early 1970s.

In order to visually observe an object that famously does not emit any light, precise measurements of stars moving in the black hole’s gravitational field had to be carried out. The independent work of Genzel and Ghez mapping the positions of these stars over many years has led to the clearest evidence yet that the center of our Milky Way galaxy contains “The Monster”, that possibly every galaxy contains a black hole, and that the environment near it looks nothing like what was expected.

Learn more: 2020 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics, Explained

The College of Sciences invite the Georgia Tech community to join a live viewing of the news conference from Washington, D.C. 

At the news conference, scientists from California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) Scientific Collaboration will discuss efforts to observe and measure gravitational waves. Laura Cadonati, an associate professor of physics, is among the scientists gathering in Washington, D.C.

With the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s prediction, interest on gravitational waves has risen to fever pitch, and rumors have been swirling about whether the LIGO team and its partner, an international team based in Italy, have detected these waves.

After the update, Deirdre Shoemaker, an associate professor in the School of Physics and the director of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics, will describe the role of Georgia Tech researchers in this effort and answer questions.

LIGO is a system of two identical detectors carefully constructed to detect incredibly tiny vibrations from passing gravitational waves. It was conceived and built by MIT and Caltech researchers and funded by NSF, with significant contributions from other U.S. and international partners. The twin detectors are located 1,865 miles apart, one in Livingston, Louisiana, and the other in Hanford, Washington.