The academy has decided to award this year’s prize with one half to Roger Penrose and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez.

“Penrose showed that the general theory of relativity leads to the formation of black holes. Genzel and Ghez discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy. A supermassive black hole is the only currently known explanation,” the statement said.

The prize amount is 10 million Swedish kronor (about Rs 8,22,85,318).

Penrose employed mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

In January 1965, ten years after Einstein’s death, Penrose proved that black holes can form and described them in detail; at their heart, black holes hide a singularity in which all the known laws of nature cease. His groundbreaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.

Genzel and Ghez, using the world’s largest telescopes, developed methods to see through the huge clouds of interstellar gas and dust to the centre of the Milky Way. Stretching the limits of technology, they refined new techniques to compensate for distortions caused by the Earth’s atmosphere, building unique instruments and committing themselves to long-term research. Their pioneering work has given us the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said: “The discoveries of this year’s Laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects. But these exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research. Not only questions about their inner structure, but also questions about how to test our theory of gravity under the extreme conditions in the immediate vicinity of a black hole”.

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Mysteries surrounding Oort Cloud

Beyond Neptune, there lies the Oort cloud, a sphere of icy debris that accommodates more than 100 billion chunks of rocks and ice, which is far more than the scientific model predicts. Avi Loeb, who led this new research also speculate that there could be an unknown planet beyond Neptune, and its gravitational pull is tugging space debris into formation.

Scientists later tried to determine how the Oort cloud was formed in the solar system. Most of the scientific hypothesis suggests the fact that the Oort cloud was formed from the disk that made the planets. However, researchers reveal that it is hard to explain why the cloud contains so many objects if they came from the inner solar system, which in turn indicates that these space bodies might have reached the outer edge from the opposite direction.

Presence of Second Sun

Loeb and his fellow researcher Amir Siraj suggested that our sun in the solar system may have a twin and this star might have helped to pass debris from interstellar space which is now present in the crowded outer reached of the solar system. According to the researchers, the gravity of the sun was not powerful enough to drew so many objects, and a second star might have catalyzed the entire process.

Researchers suggested that this twin might have broken away from its orbit at one point in time, and it ended up in a completely different region in space. However, the influence of this star remains in the Oort cloud.
Loeb revealed that we could never find this second star as the Milky Way has rotated and has shifted too much since the separation of the twins.

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