Context: The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded with one half to Roger Penrose and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for furthering the understanding of black holes, the most “enigmatic” objects in the universe.

Their contribution
Roger Penrose

• Roger Penrose is a British mathematical physicist at the University of Oxford. The scientist has been rewarded for the discovery that the black hole formation is a robust prediction for the general theory of Relativity.
• He invented ingenious mathematical methods to explore Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Penrose showed that the theory leads to the formation of black holes that capture everything that enters them.

Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel

• German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel and American astronomer Andrea Ghez, who have been jointly awarded the Nobel Prize discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy and a supermassive black hole is the only currently known explanation.
• Andrea Ghez has also now become the fourth woman to ever win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

About Black hole 

• It is an object in space that is so dense and has such strong gravity that no matter or light can escape its pull. Because no light can escape, it is black and invisible.
• There’s a boundary at the edge of a black hole called the event horizon, which is the point of no return — any light or matter that crosses that boundary is sucked into the black hole. It would need to travel faster than the speed of light to escape, which is impossible.
• Anything that crosses the event horizon is destined to fall to the very centre of the black hole and be squished into a single point with infinite density, called the singularity.

Watch : https://youtu.be/oLeKFDfCrTg
Where are black holes found?

• Supermassive black holes are found at the centre of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way. The one in our galaxy is called Sagittarius A* and is one of those the Event Horizon Telescope has been attempting to photograph.
• Sagittarius A* isn’t the only black hole in our galaxy, though. Earlier this year, astronomers discovered another 12 within three light-years of it, suggesting there could be upwards of 10,000 black holes around the galactic centre.

Where do black holes come from?

• Supermassive black holes are believed to form at the same time as the galaxy that surrounds them, but astronomers aren’t sure exactly how.
• Stellar mass black holes form when a star with a mass greater than three times that of our sun runs out of fuel. It explodes into a supernova and collapses into an extremely dense core that we know as a black hole — something predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.