Roger Penrose (left), Reinhard Genzel (center), Andrea Gaetz (right). Image from the official website of the Nobel Prize
Kant said that there are two things in the world that can shake people’s hearts: one is the high moral standards in our hearts; the other is the starry sky above us.
In 2020, three scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering one of the universe’s strangest phenomena – black holes.
Where all known laws fail
An overweight monster will capture anything that enters its "hunting range," not even light can escape. This is a black hole. In many cultural forms, the word black hole has a deeper meaning, but for physicists, black holes have always been the product of the natural death of giant stars after they ran out of energy.
In the last century, Einstein’s theory of general relativity upended all notions of space and time; Oppenheimer calculated the violent collapse of a massive star. But these were considered purely theoretical conjectures until one man, who first succeeded in finding a solution to reality, was Roger Penrose. He used clever mathematics to show that black holes are a direct prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Black holes hide incomprehensible strangeness, in which all known laws of nature stop. Published 10 years after Einstein’s death, this paper is regarded as the most important contribution to general relativity.
There is only one answer: supermassive black holes
Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Gaetz each led a team of astronomers that successfully mapped the orbits of the brightest stars closest to the center of the Milky Way, and both groups found that there was an invisible, but very heavy object that caused these stars to rotate around at an alarming rate.
What is this invisible object that weighs as much as 4 million solar masses? According to the attractive force theory, there is only one possible explanation – a supermassive black hole.
Using the world’s largest telescope to see the center of the Milky Way through giant clouds of interstellar gas and dust, Gentzel and Gates have stretched the limits of technology, perfected new techniques, compensated for distortions caused by Earth’s atmosphere, and created unique instruments that can be used for long-term studies. Their work provides the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, as well as clues to new theoretical insights.
If anything lasts forever, it’s the unknown.
Penrose’s work tells us that black holes are a direct result of general relativity, and Genzel and Gaetz have done precise tests of general relativity and its predictions. But in the midst of infinitely large singular attractive forces, the theory no longer applies. Scientists are creating a new theory of quantum attractive forces. This must bring together the two pillars of physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, which will meet inside black holes.
"It’s not just about their internal structure, but also about how to test our theory of attractive forces in the extreme conditions in the immediate vicinity of black holes," said David Havilland, chairperson of the Nobel physics committee. He believes that it is the discoveries of this year’s winners that have opened up new horizons in the study of compact and supermassive celestial bodies, but these peculiar objects still pose many questions to humanity and inspire people to come up with answers through research.