American - Scientist | June 16, 1965 -
Gravity wins over all other known forces.
Andrea M. Ghez
GravityOverForcesKnownWins
How do you observe something you can't see? This is the basic question of somebody who's interested in finding and studying black holes. Because black holes are objects whose pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it, not even light, so you can't see it directly.
LightBlackFindingYouEscapeSee
We have this interesting problem with black holes. What is a black hole? It is a region of space where you have mass that's confined to zero volume, which means that the density is infinitely large, which means we have no way of describing, really, what a black hole is!
SpaceBlackInterestingProblemYou
One of the big mysteries about the black hole at the center of the galaxy is, 'Why don't we see emission from matter falling onto the black hole, or, rather, the black hole eating up its surroundings?'
EatingBlackWhyMatterGalaxySee
An ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star's life.
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The star S0-2 orbits around Sgr A* every 16 years and will go through its closest approach in 2018. That's an opportunity to test Einstein's General Relativity theory through very precise measurements of this star's short period orbit.
OpportunityShortGoTestWillStar
The question that I started off with was, I thought, very simple. It was just 'Is there a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way?' But one of the things I love about science is that you always end up with new questions.
LoveScienceSimpleThoughtEndYou
Black holes are very exotic objects. Technically, a black hole puts a huge amount of mass inside of zero volume. So our understanding of the center of black holes doesn't make sense, which is a big clue to physicists that we don't have our physics quite right.
BlackUnderstandingPhysicsRight
Fortunately, most things around the supermassive black hole are just going to go around it. They're going to orbit it. They don't actually get sucked in.
BlackGoThingsGoingGetJust
The key to proving that there's a black hole is showing that there's a tremendous amount of mass in a very small volume. And you can do that with the motions of stars.
StarsSmallBlackKeyYouProving
The Keck telescope, which is the largest in the world, had opened just before I began my faculty position at UCLA.
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I'm interested in finding whether or not there is a really massive, what we like to call 'super massive' black hole at the center of our galaxy. And the reason this is interesting is that it gives us an opportunity to prove whether or not these exotic objects really exist.
OpportunityBlackInterestingFinding
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