Nobel Prize 2020: Selected Articles on Black Hole and General Relativity

Dear Colleagues,

On behalf of the Advisory and Editorial Board members of Universe, it is a pleasure for me, as the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, to announce a Special Issue to celebrate Professor Roger Penrose, who serves on Universe’s Advisory Board, being jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2020.

The possibility that peculiar regions in spacetime allow only for the inward motion of light and matter, which later gained notoriety as Black Holes (BHs), is one of the most exotic and, at the same time, disorienting fruits to have fallen from the branched tree of the Einsteinian General Theory of Relativity (GTR) soon after its birth. A gift that the latter’s father himself denied, convinced that there could be no realistic physical processes capable of actually creating such a bizarre spacetime configuration at the end of the gravitational collapse of any real astrophysical object. Decades later, Professor Penrose elucidated that, on the contrary, the GTR cannot avoid the formation of BHs even in physically realistic scenarios for the latter stages of the life of a sufficiently heavy star. Perhaps even more astounding and disturbing, the final act of the infalling matter after its crossing of the event horizon signals, at the BH’s center, the GTR reaching the boundaries of its validity. An unescapable spacetime singularity warns us that Einstein’s theory cannot be the last word about gravity, pointing toward the need for its marriage, to date not yet celebrated, with quantum mechanics.

A subtle red thread ideally connects such theoretical studies to the empirical investigations carried out in recent decades by the other laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2020, Professor Genzel and Professor Ghez, that aimed to observationally corroborate the concept of BHs to which the results of Professor Penrose gave so firm theoretical support.

His fertile physical intuition, his multidisciplinary curiosity, and the elegance of his mathematical methods have also tirelessly led Professor Penrose on other roads at the intersection of different scientific domains. Our hope is that he will continue treading these paths, in the hope that he will discover new interesting ones.

In the footsteps of Professor Penrose, we invite all researchers in this field to contribute their valuable papers to this celebratory Special Issue of Universe.

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Key discoveries

Gravitational Lensing in Presence of Plasma: Strong Lens Systems, Black Hole Lensing and Shadow

A Model of Black Hole Evaporation and 4D Weyl Anomaly

Influence of Cosmic Repulsion and Magnetic Fields on Accretion Disks Rotating around Kerr Black Holes

Reissner–Nordström Anti-de Sitter Black Holes in Mimetic F(R) Gravity

On a Model of Magnetically Charged Black Hole with Nonlinear Electrodynamics

Searching for Quantum Black Hole Structure with the Event Horizon Telescope

Shadow Images of a Rotating Dyonic Black Hole with a Global Monopole Surrounded by Perfect Fluid

Small Black/White Hole Stability and Dark Matter

Perspectives on Constraining a Cosmological Constant-Type Parameter with Pulsar Timing in the Galactic Center

Thermodynamic Analysis of Non-Linear Reissner-Nordström Black Holes

Analogies between the Black Hole Interior and the Type II Weyl Semimetals

Kerr Black Holes within a Modified Theory of Gravity

The First Detection of Gravitational Waves

Quantum Tunneling Radiation from Loop Quantum Black Holes and the Information Loss Paradox

Investigating the Poor Match among Different Precessing Gravitational Waveforms

The Origin of Matter at the Base of Relativistic Jets in Active Galactic Nuclei

Quantum Analysis of BTZ Black Hole Formation Due to the Collapse of a Dust Shell

On the Energy of a Non-Singular Black Hole Solution Satisfying the Weak Energy Condition

Further reading

Classical Collapse to Black Holes and Quantum Bounces: A Review

Black Holes: Eliminating Information or Illuminating New Physics?

Dark Energy and Spacetime Symmetry

Brief Review on Black Hole Loop Quantization

Generic Features of Thermodynamics of Horizons in Regular Spherical Space-Times of the Kerr-Schild Class

The Effects of Finite Distance on the Gravitational Deflection Angle of Light

Approaching the Black Hole by Numerical Simulations

Jetted Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 Galaxies & Co.: Where Do We Stand?

Visible Shapes of Black Holes M87* and SgrA*

Prof. Dr. Lorenzo Iorio
Collection Editor

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