Analysis for Science Librarians of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics: Luminous Bodies, Black Holes, and How They Come Together at the Milky Way’s Heart

ABSTRACT

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez. Penrose was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for creating a groundbreaking black hole theorem that drew on a half-century of theoretical speculations about singularities in general relativity. Ghez and Genzel share the remaining half of the prize for their research teams’ decades of precise observations of the center of the Milky Way, determining from stellar orbits that a supermassive compact object lies at the heart of the galaxy, consistent with predictions for a roughly 4 million solar-mass black hole. This paper describes the science behind the prize, each scientist’s career, and concludes with a citation analysis of each laureate that draws on Web of Science and Scopus data.

KEYWORDS:

• Black holes
• Sagittarius A*
• citation analysis
• nobel prize in physics
• Andrea Ghez
• Reinhard Genzel
• Roger Penrose
• cosmology