Vortrag
A forty year journey - Festkolloquium zum Nobelpreis für Physik 2020
Monday 16.11.2020, 16:15 - 18:00
Speaker
Prof. Dr. Reinhard Genzel
„Für die Entdeckung eines supermassiven kompakten Objekts im Zentrum unserer Galaxie“ erhält Reinhard Genzel in diesem Jahr den Nobelpreis für Physik. Im Münchner Physik-Kolloquium berichtet er über eine "vierzigjährige Reise".
More than one hundred years ago, Albert Einstein published his Theory of General
Relativity (GR). One year later, Karl Schwarzschild solved the GR equations for
a non-rotating, spherical mass distribution; if this mass is sufficiently
compact, even light cannot escape from within the so called event horizon, and
there is a mass singularity at the center. The theoretical concept of a `black
hole' was born, and was refined in the next decades by work of Penrose, Wheeler,
Kerr, Hawking and many others. First indirect evidence for the existence of such
black holes in our Universe came from observations of compact X-ray binaries and
distant luminous quasars. I will discuss the forty year journey, which my
colleagues and I have been undertaking to study the mass distribution in the
Center of our Milky Way from ever more precise, long term studies of the motions
of gas and stars as test particles of the space time. These studies show the
existence of a four million solar mass object, which must be a single massive
black hole, beyond any reasonable doubt.
Organizer
Physik-Department
Contact
Dr. Johannes Wiedersich
Further information available under: https://www.ph.tum.de/latest/events/kolloquium/physik-kolloquium-se-2020-11-16.pdf