Educators with UC ties win Nobel
Berkeley professor emeritus, UCLA peer awarded physics prize for work discovering massive black hole
Two rival University of California astrophysicists are among the three winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics for decades-long research that confirmed the presence of the supermassive black hole that lurks in the heart of our Milky Way.
UC Berkeley professor emeritus of physics Reinhard Genzel and UCLA physics and astronomy professor Andrea Ghez share half of the prize for developing methods to peer through vast veils of dusty gas to the center of our galaxy, revealing a massive object so deep and dense that not even light can escape it.
Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford in
England was awarded the other half of this year’s prize for his use of “ingenious mathematical methods,” the academy said, to prove that black holes are a startling illustration of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
The prize, announced Tuesday in Stockholm, celebrates monstrous black holes — “one of the most exotic objects in the universe,” said Nobel committee scientists — which anchor the center of galaxies, including our own. The universe is speckled with them.
Discovered in a dark
patch of sky in the constellation Sagittarius, our black hole occupies the exact center of our Milky Way, where it eats stars and creates the galaxy’s iconic spiral shape. It’s the weight of 4 million suns.
Genzel, 68, retired from UC Berkeley and now directing many’s Planck tute traterrestrial for Insti- Max Ger- ExPhysics, spends most now of his time in his native Germany. He is the ninth Nobel winner currently affiliated with Berkeley and one of 24 faculty members overall.
As a young man, Genzel was one of the best javelin throwers in Germany, even training with the national team for the 1972 Munich Olympics. He arrived at UC Berkeley in the 1980s as a postdoctoral fellow under physicist Charles Townes, a Nobel laureate and an inventor of lasers.
That’s when he became interested in the dim doings of our galactic center. Genzel and Townes presented the first observations hinting that the center of our galaxy harbored a massive black hole, though the evidence was weak. Genzel worked steadfastly over the ensuing decades to prove his case, according to UC Berkeley.
“It is particularly mov-
ing that he began his Nobel work as a postdoctoral fellow with another Nobelist, Charles Townes, advancing extraordinary work at Berkeley on the mysteries of the cosmos,” UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ said.
New York-born Ghez, 55, is the fourth woman to win a Nobel in physics, following Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018. She directs the UCLA Galactic Center Group.
“I hope I can inspire other young women into the field,” she said at a news conference early Tuesday. “It’s a field that has so many pleasures, and if you are passionate about the science, there’s so much that can be done.”
Ghez earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from MIT in 1987 and a doctorate from Caltech in 1992, and she has been a member of the UCLA faculty since 1994. When she was young, she wanted to be the first woman to walk on the moon. She is the eighth UCLA faculty member to be named a Nobel laureate.
Ghez helped pioneer a powerful technology called adaptive optics, which corrects the distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere in real time and opened the center of our galaxy as a laboratory for exploring black holes and their fundamental role in the evolution of the universe, according to UCLA.
A fierce competition to prove the existence of the black hole developed between the two UC scientists. Genzel’s team used an array of telescopes at the Euro
pean Southern Observatory in Chile; Ghez’s team used telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
The rivalry was a benefit to the progress of science, Genzel told a celebratory gathering of UC Berkeley faculty, students and staff on a Tuesday afternoon Zoom call.
“The scientific audience was in a perfect position to see us perform the same exercise and judge whether the outcome was the same,” he said.
Genzel says he won’t board a flight to the U.S. until there is a vaccine for COVID-19, but over congratulatory emails, the two UC winners agreed to share a virtual champagne event. “I hope we can agree to come back together,” said Genzel.
In 1969, Donald LyndenBell and Martin Rees suggested that the Milky Way galaxy might contain a supermassive black hole at its center, but evidence was lacking because the galactic core is obscured by interstellar dust and could only be detected as a relatively faint radio source, called Sagittarius A*, according to UC Berkeley.
By helping to show that a supermassive black hole resides at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, this year’s Nobel winners answered a question that had been a subject of much debate among astronomers for more than a quarter of a century.
Penrose proved with mathematics that the formation of black holes was possible, based heavily on Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which asserts that gravity can warp the normal geometry of space and time. The concentration of massive amounts of matter or energy causes time to slow and matter to shrink. It creates a bottomless sinkhole.
Genzel and Ghez looked at the dust- covered center of our Milky Way galaxy where something strange was going on — several stars moving around something they couldn’t see. Using the world’s largest telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, they looked through the huge clouds of interstellar gas and dust and detected an extremely heavy, invisible object tugging on this jumble of stars.
It is common for several scientists who worked in related fields to share the prize. Last year’s prize went to Canadian-born cosmologist James Peebles for theoretical work about the early moments after the Big Bang, and Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for discovering a planet outside our solar system.
The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (more than $1.1 million), courtesy of a bequest left 124 years ago by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The amount was increased recently to adjust for inflation.
On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine to Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus.
The other prizes, to be announced in the coming days, are for outstanding work in the fields of chemistry, literature, peace and economics.