By Rachel Hergett, MSU News Service
BOZEMAN — The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded Tuesday was split between theoretical and observational advancements in the understanding of the most mysterious objects in the universe, objects studied for decades by researchers at Montana State University: black holes.
MSU researchers have long studied general relativity and its implications, said Yves Idzerda, a physicist and dean of MSU’s College of Letters and Science. The announcement comes three years after research by Neil Cornish, director of MSU’s eXtreme Gravity Institute and a professor in the Department of Physics, contributed to another Nobel Prize in Physics for the detection of gravitational waves. His work focuses on gravitational wave signatures from the interactions of black holes and other compact, dense objects.
“Linking together 2017 and 2020 — both extreme gravity-related Nobel Prizes — this has been a good run for this kind of work,” Cornish said. “And I suspect there is another one coming.”
While many advancements in research go unnoticed by the general population, the annual Nobel Prize announcements are unmatched for bringing scientific progress to the public eye.
“Everyone looks to the Nobel,” Idzerda said. “The announcements remind people of how exciting the science research going on everywhere is, and MSU is involved in exactly that kind of research.”
Half of this year’s physics prize lauded Roger Penrose, an English mathematician based at Oxford University, who proved the existence of black holes using Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity in a 1965 paper, describing the singularity at their heart where physical laws would cease to exist. Though Einstein believed nature would find a way to sort out the math in his own theories that predicted black holes, Penrose showed the inevitability of this collapse of space-time.
“There was a paradigm shift when we understood black holes were something to be taken seriously,” said Cornish, who met Penrose while the former was a postdoctoral researcher in theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking’s lab at Cambridge University. “They are not just an abstract mathematical solution to Einstein’s equations.”
The scope of Penrose’s work paved the way for observational research on black holes, which remain notoriously hard to study due to an intense gravitational pull that even light cannot escape. Researchers instead look at what is around the void in space and how those objects interact to prove a black hole is responsible.
The other half of the roughly $1.1 million Nobel Prize went to two different research teams whose long-term concurrent work following the paths of stars nearest the center of our own Milky Way provides a visual of the supermassive black hole expected to be at the galaxy’s center. The teams were led by German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and a professor at the University of California Berkeley, and American astronomer Andrea Ghez, a professor at the University of California Los Angeles.
Ghez is the fourth woman to win the physics prize in its 119-year history, and the first in the field of astrophysics. Marie Curie won in 1903 for her research on radioactivity. Maria Goeppert Mayer followed in 1963 for the creation of the nuclear shell model of atomic structure. Donna Strickland won in 2018 for work on amplifying laser pulses.
A row of posters of notable women in science line a wall in Barnard Hall on the MSU campus. Amy Reines, another black hole researcher at the university, spearheaded the installation of this “Beyond Curie” exhibit. Representation is hugely important in the sciences, she said, and acknowledgement by major awards such as the Nobel Prize is part of it.
"It's hard to be what you don't see," she said.
Reines’ research looks to dwarf galaxies in a search for ever-smaller supermassive black holes, which may lend insight into their formation.
“It has implications for how black holes, like the one at the center of the Milky Way, came to be in the first place,” she said.
Anne Lohfink, an assistant professor of physics at MSU, studies how gravitational energy is converted into tiny bits of light as black holes attract the things surrounding them, a process known as accretion.
Lohfink showed a video from Ghez’s lab of stars orbiting the galactic center to her introductory astronomy class, known as “Mysteries of the Sky,” at MSU on Tuesday. The video, she said, helps students understand both the nature of black holes and the research around them.
“I show it to highlight to them, ‘Look, this is something we can do,’” Lohfink said.
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