Genzel, Reinhard

Reinhard Genzel, (born March 24, 1952, Bad Homburg, West Germany), German astronomer who was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. He shared the prize with British mathematician Roger Penrose and American astronomer Andrea Ghez.

Genzel received a diploma in physics from the University of Bonn in 1975 and a doctorate in physics and astronomy from the same institution in 1978. From 1978 to 1980 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 1981 he became an associate professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and he became a full professor there in 1985. From 1986 he divided his time between Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, where he was director.

Genzel and his collaborators began studying the galactic centre in 1992 with the New Technology Telescope in Chile. They used a camera that worked near the diffraction limit of the telescope to study how stars near the centre of the Galaxy changed their positions over years. By measuring the velocity of these stars’ orbits, they found that the centre of the Galaxy was a point source, not an extended source such as a stellar cluster. (Ghez and her collaborators performed similar observations at the same time, using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.) Beginning in 2002, Genzel and his collaborators used adaptive optics (in which the telescope mirror changes shape to remove the effects of atmospheric distortion) at the Very Large Telescope in Chile. By measuring the orbit of a particular star, which went around the galactic centre every 15.2 years and came within 17 light-hours of the centre at its closest approach, the team found that the central source had a mass about four million times that of the Sun and thus was a supermassive black hole.