# R3 | deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro | run 1

## Prompt

Who was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, and for what? Cite your sources.

## Response

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists for groundbreaking discoveries about black holes. Half of the prize went to **Roger Penrose** for his theoretical proof that black hole formation is a robust prediction of general relativity. The other half was shared jointly by **Reinhard Genzel** and **Andrea Ghez** for their discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our Milky Way galaxy [nobelprize.org](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/summary/).

## The Laureates and Their Discoveries

### Roger Penrose — Theoretical Foundation for Black Holes
**Prize share:** 1/2

Roger Penrose, born in 1931 in Colchester, UK, demonstrated mathematically in 1965 that black holes are a direct and inevitable consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. His singularity theorem showed that under very general conditions, collapsing matter will always form a singularity — a point of infinite density where space and time cease to exist, surrounded by an event horizon. This work firmly established that black holes are not merely mathematical curiosities but real physical objects that must form in nature [nobelprize.org](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/popular-information/).

Penrose earned his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of Cambridge and is a professor at the University of Oxford [nobelprize.org](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/popular-information/).

### Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez — The Supermassive Black Hole at the Galactic Center
**Prize share:** 1/4 each

Reinhard Genzel (born 1952 in Bad Homburg, Germany) and Andrea Ghez (born 1965 in New York City, USA) led independent research teams that mapped the orbits of stars at the very center of the Milky Way with extraordinary precision. By tracking these stars over decades, both teams revealed that they orbit an invisible, extremely massive object at tremendous speeds. Their calculations showed that this object — designated Sagittarius A* — contains approximately four million solar masses, compressed into a region no larger than our solar system. The only known explanation for such a compact, massive object is a supermassive black hole [nobelprize.org](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/press-release/) [nobelprize.org](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/popular-information/).

Genzel, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn in 1978, directs the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and is a professor at UC Berkeley. Ghez earned her Ph.D. from Caltech in 1992 and is a professor at UCLA [nobelprize.org](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/popular-information/).

The total prize amount was 10 million Swedish kronor, with half awarded to Penrose and the other half divided equally between Genzel and Ghez [nobelprize.org](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/press-release/).

Would you like to know more about the specific observational techniques Genzel and Ghez used to track those distant stars?
