Reinhard Genzel facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Reinhard Genzel
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Genzel in 2012
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| Born | 24 March 1952 Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, West Germany (now Germany)
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| Known for | Infrared astronomy Submillimetre astronomy |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Astrophysics |
| Institutions | Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics University of California, Berkeley |
| Thesis | Beobachtung von H2O-Masern in Gebieten von OB-Sternentstehung (1978) |
| Doctoral advisor | Peter Georg Mezger |
Reinhard Genzel (born March 24, 1952) is a German astrophysicist. He is a co-director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. He also teaches at LMU and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 2020, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared this prize with Andrea Ghez and Roger Penrose. They were honored for finding a supermassive compact object. This object is at the very center of our galaxy.
Life and Career
Reinhard Genzel was born in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Germany. His father, Ludwig Genzel, was a professor of solid state physics. This field studies how solid materials behave.
Reinhard studied physics at the University of Freiburg. He also attended the University of Bonn. In 1978, he earned his PhD in radioastronomy. He did this research at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.
After his studies, he worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He then became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1986, he moved back to Germany. He became a director at the Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik. This institute is in Garching. He also taught at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. From 1999 to 2016, he continued to teach part-time at Berkeley. He also helped choose winners for the Shaw Prize in astronomy.
Work
Reinhard Genzel studies the universe using infrared astronomy and submillimetre astronomy. These methods let scientists see things that normal telescopes cannot. His team builds special instruments for ground and space telescopes.
They used these tools to watch stars moving near the center of the Milky Way. These stars orbit around an object called Sagittarius A*. Genzel and his team showed that these stars were circling a very heavy object. This object is now known to be a black hole.
Genzel also studies how galaxies form and change over time.
In 2018, Genzel and his team made an important discovery. They watched a star called S2 as it orbited Sagittarius A*. The star moved incredibly fast, at 2.55% the speed of light. This happened when it was closest to the black hole. This observation helped them test general relativity. This is Albert Einstein's theory about gravity. Their findings helped confirm that Einstein's theory is correct.
Awards
Reinhard Genzel has received many important awards for his work:
- Otto Hahn Medal, 1980
- Presidential Young Investigator Award, 1984
- Newton Lacy Pierce Prize, 1986
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, 1990
- De Vaucouleurs Medal, 2000
- Prix Jules Janssen, 2000
- Stern Gerlach Medal, 2003
- Balzan Prize for Infrared Astronomy, 2003
- Albert Einstein Medal, 2007
- Shaw Prize, 2008
- "Galileo 2000" Prize, 2009
- Karl Schwarzschild Medal, 2011
- Crafoord Prize, 2012
- Tycho Brahe Prize, 2012
- Pour le Mérite, 2013
- Harvey Prize, 2014
- Herschel Medal, 2014
- Nobel Prize in Physics, 2020
- Bayerischer Maximiliansorden, 2021
Membership of scientific societies
Reinhard Genzel is a member of many important scientific groups:
- Fellow of the American Physical Society, 1985
- Foreign member of the Académie des Sciences (France), 1998
- Foreign member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, 2000
- Member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, 2002
- Senior member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003
- Foreign member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences, 2011
- Foreign member of the Royal Society of London, 2012
- Member of the Pontifical Academy, 2020
See also
In Spanish: Reinhard Genzel para niños
