Andrea M. Ghez quotes

Andrea M. Ghez is an American astrophysicist renowned for her pioneering work on the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Her research provided compelling evidence for the existence of a supermassive black hole at our galaxy's core. She received the Nobel Prize in Physics for her groundbreaking contributions to astronomy. Here are 7 of her quotes:

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.

Andrea M. Ghez

The Keck telescope, which is the largest in the world, had opened just before I began my faculty position at UCLA.

Andrea M. Ghez

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.

Andrea M. Ghez

As an astronomer, I get to ignore the details of the things that we don't understand. There's a lot of work that we can do on scales that we do understand, and there is actually a finite size that I can associate with a super massive black hole.

Andrea M. Ghez

Our galaxy's pretty ordinary, garden-variety. So if we believe our galaxy has a super massive black hole, that tells us that most, if not all, galaxies host such a black hole at their centers.

Andrea M. Ghez

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.

Andrea M. Ghez