Andrea Ghez became the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, honored for discovering a supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's center.
On October 6, 2020, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Andrea Ghez would share the Nobel Prize in Physics with Reinhard Genzel and Roger Penrose. Ghez and Genzel were honored 'for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy,' now known to be the black hole Sagittarius A*.
This made Ghez the fourth woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, following Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), and Donna Strickland (2018)—a stark illustration of how underrepresented women have historically been in this field over more than a century of Nobel history.
Ghez's award recognized decades of meticulous work using the Keck Observatory telescopes in Hawaii, where she and her team tracked the orbits of stars near the center of the Milky Way. By applying innovative adaptive optics techniques to correct for atmospheric distortion, her team achieved unprecedented precision, definitively proving the existence of an invisible, incredibly massive object—a supermassive black hole with a mass about 4 million times that of the Sun—governing the orbits of these stars.
Her Nobel win was celebrated as a landmark moment for women in STEM, inspiring renewed conversations about gender representation in physics and cementing her legacy as a pioneering astrophysicist and mentor to a new generation of scientists.