He didn't achieve everything.

Reinhard Genzel, for example, does not have an Olympic medal, although he had a chance to take part in the 1972 games - he was one of the best young German javelin throwers at the time.

But by then sport had already lost him to physics.

Of course, there is also gold to be won there, and he won it: In 2020, Genzel received the Nobel Prize together with the American Andrea Ghez and the British Roger Penrose: for proving that there can hardly be anything else hidden in the center of our galaxy than a black one hole with the mass of four million suns.

The Swedish gold was the culmination of a career that also had the character of a sporting competition - between Genzel and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and that of Andrea Ghez in Los Angeles.

Genzel, who became Max Planck Director at the age of 34, was lucky enough to be able to do it.

The end of the Cold War made previously secret techniques for infrared observations available, and Genzel was one of the first to systematically apply them to astronomy.

Because in normal light, the stars in the center of the Milky Way, whose orbits ultimately revealed the black hole, cannot be seen there behind the clouds of gas and dust.

And in 2002, a new observatory had just been completed in Chile when one of those stars completed its orbit after 16 years, allowing the Genzel team to observe a closed ellipse, proving that the four million masses of the sun were indeed in one in such a small space that only a black hole can practically be the case.

Infrared astronomy is now a separate branch of research.

Your pioneer Reinhard Genzel turns seventy today.