And then after that you get to probe more detailed questions because you kind of know where in space the star is.įor example, S0-2 (which is my favorite star in the galaxy, and probably in the universe) goes around every 16 years. Both of those things should imprint on the orbits.Ī simple way that I like to think about it is: The first time around, these orbits tell you the shape. The one that I'm super excited about is our ability to test how gravity works near the supermassive black hole using star orbits, and also as a probe of dark matter at the center of the galaxy. What unanswered questions about the universe excite you most? The Event Horizon Telescope is a similar story. We're really lucky that we're living at this moment where technology is evolving so quickly that you can really rewrite the textbooks. And so often that reveals unexpected discoveries. One of the things that I love about working in these areas where the technology is evolving really quickly is that it affords you the opportunity to see the universe in a way you haven't been able to see before. Everything that we do really can be described as technology-enabled discovery. I often say we're surfing on a wave of technological development. How much have technological capabilities changed for researchers since you started studying black holes? That's the prediction of where gravity should bend, and that's exactly where you see it. You should see this ring at roughly two and a half times the Schwarzschild radius (the radius of the event horizon, the boundary around a black hole beyond which no light or matter can escape). We live in a really interesting moment where technology is advancing so rapidly in so many arenas and giving us new insights into these incredibly exotic objects.ĭoes it look different than you anticipated? How does it feel to finally lay eyes on the thing you've spent your career studying? The interview has been edited for length and clarity. The Los Angeles Times spoke to her about black holes, cosmic surprises and what Einstein has to do with the GPS app on your phone. Though she wasn't involved with the EHT project, she said its "impressive" achievements-including its 2019 unveiling of the black hole anchoring a distant galaxy known as Messier 87-offer intriguing new possibilities for the study of the cosmos. Ghez studies the center of our galaxy and the orbits of thousands of stars encircling the dense object at its very heart. That object is now known to be Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short. In 2020, Ghez was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for her role in the discovery of a supermassive object at the core of the Milky Way. Feryal Özel, a University of Arizona astronomer and founding member of the EHT consortium, said that seeing the black hole's image was like finally meeting in real life a person you've only interacted with online.įor Andrea Ghez, an astrophysicist at UCLA, the encounter was perhaps more like a biographer meeting her subject after decades of pursuit.
0 kommentar(er)
