Illustration of the German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel (born 1952). Genzel is best known for his work studying the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. He used observations from the New Technology Telescope and Very Large Telescope, both in Chile, to study the stars at the centre of our galaxy. By measuring the velocity of the star's orbits he was able to determine that the central object had a mass of around four million time that of the Sun and therefore was a supermassive black hole. Genzel shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics with Roger Penrose and Andrea Ghez for this work.