Reinhard Genzel: Testing the Massive Black Hole Paradigm in the Galactic Center

Bolzano lecture of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic
Thursday, 20 April 2023
A Forty Year Journey: Portray of the stepwise progress in the evidence for the existence of the massive black hole in the Galactic Center. It hinged on several key breakthroughs in experimental/observational astronomy, from adaptive optics and sensitive detectors to optical interferometry.
German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, a Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich professor and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
He was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy, which he shared with Andrea Ghez and with Roger Penrose (who was awarded for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity).