以表彰他發現並證明我們銀河系中心存在超大質量黑洞的傑出貢獻
2008年度邵逸夫天文學獎頒予德國馬普地外物理研究所所長萊因哈德．根舍，以表彰他發現並證明我們銀河系中心存在超大質量黑洞的傑出貢獻。
1969年唐納．林登貝爾和馬丁．里斯提出銀河系可能有超大質量黑洞。但當時缺乏觀測證據，因銀河系中心被星際塵埃遮擋，探測到的只是一個很暗弱的射電源。萊因哈德．根舍對這個挑戰性的猜測，找到了證據。他發展了最先進的天文設備，並持之以恒地對銀河系中心進行長達數年的觀測，終於笫一個獲得確切證據，發現在銀河系中心有一個黑洞，其質量是太陽質量的數百萬倍。
At the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, Donald Lynden-Bell and Martin Rees proposed that the Milky Way and perhaps most other galactic nuclei might contain a central massive black hole. But the evidence for such an object was lacking at the time because the centre of the Milky Way is obscured by interstellar dust, and was detected only as a relatively faint radio source.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Charles Townes and his collaborators including Reinhard Genzel, developed instruments capable of observing the centre of the Milky Way at infrared wavelengths, which can pass through the interstellar dust clouds with relatively little obscuration. By analyzing the spectrum of such radiation, they inferred that gas is swirling around a central concentration containing a few million solar masses. These authors suggested that the central object might be a supermassive black hole, but the observations did not have sufficient angular resolution to prove that conjecture.
