以表彰他发现并证明我们银河系中心存在超大质量黑洞的杰出贡献
2008年度邵逸夫天文学奖颁予德国马普地外物理研究所所长莱因哈德．根舍，以表彰他发现并证明我们银河系中心存在超大质量黑洞的杰出贡献。
1969年唐纳．林登贝尔和马丁．里斯提出银河系可能有超大质量黑洞。但当时缺乏观测证据，因银河系中心被星际尘埃遮挡，探测到的只是一个很暗弱的射电源。莱因哈德．根舍对这个挑战性的猜测，找到了证据。他发展了最先进的天文设备，并持之以恒地对银河系中心进行长达数年的观测，终於笫一个获得确切证据，发现在银河系中心有一个黑洞，其质量是太阳质量的数百万倍。
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.
