Added 1 new A* page:The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded, in two halves, to three different people—and all for research into black holes (Reuters).
Roger Penrose of Oxford won half the prize, for his 1965 paper showing how black holes form mathematically, as a consequence of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Penrose has made many other memorable contributions to science; his Wikipedia page is a fascinating read!
Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute and the University of California, and Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles, shared the other half of the award, for their separate discovery of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy by observing the curious motion of the stars near it over the course of the late 90s and early 2000s.
That supermassive black hole is, of course, the one whose previously detected radio source had been denominated "Sagittarius A*." Wikipedia adds of the name: "a bright and very compact component Sgr A* was discovered on February 13 and 15, 1974, by astronomers Bruce Balick and Robert Brown using the baseline interferometer of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory [...] Sgr A* was coined by Brown in a 1982 paper because the radio source was 'exciting,' and excited states of atoms are denoted with asterisks." (And, as seen from Earth, it appeared to lie in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.)
(Thanks @n1vux for the tip. : )
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The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
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