Andrea M. Ghez

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Andrea M. Ghez
Andrea Ghez.jpg
Ghez in April 2019
Born
Andrea Mia Ghez

(1965-06-16) June 16, 1965 (age 58)
New York City, U.S.
Education
Known forDiscovery of a supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center
Adaptive optics
Awards MacArthur Fellowship (2008)
Crafoord Prize (2012)
Nobel Prize in Physics (2020)
Scientific career
Fields Astrophysics
Institutions University of California, Los Angeles
Thesis The Multiplicity of T Tauri Stars in the Star Forming Regions Taurus-Auriga and Ophiuchus-Scorpius: A 2.2μm Speckle Imaging Survey  (1993)
Doctoral advisor Gerry Neugebauer
Website astro.ucla.edu/~ghez/

Andrea Mia Ghez (born June 16, 1965) is an American astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine chair in Astrophysics, at the University of California, Los Angeles. [1] Her research focuses on the center of the Milky Way galaxy. [2]

Contents

In 2020, she became the fourth woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing one half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel (the other half being awarded to Roger Penrose). [1] [3] The Nobel Prize was awarded to Ghez and Genzel for their discovery of a supermassive compact object, now generally recognized to be a black hole, in the Milky Way's Galactic Center. [4] [5]

Early life

Ghez was born in New York City. [1] She is the daughter of Susanne (née Gayton) and Gilbert Ghez. [6] [7] Her father, of Jewish heritage, was born in Rome, Italy, to a family originally from Tunisia and Frankfurt, Germany. [8] [9] Her mother was from an Irish Catholic family from North Attleborough, Massachusetts. [10]

Her family moved from New York to Chicago when she was a child, and Ghez attended the University of Chicago Lab School. [6] [11] The Apollo program Moon landings inspired Ghez to aspire to be the first female astronaut, and her mother encouraged that goal by purchasing a telescope. [12] [13] Her most influential female role model was her high school chemistry teacher. [14]

She began college by majoring in mathematics, then changed to physics. [15] She received a BS in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. [13] [16] While there, she was a member of the fraternity of St. Anthony Hall. [17] [18] She received a PhD under the direction of Gerry Neugebauer at the California Institute of Technology in 1992. [19]

Career

Ghez's research employs high spatial resolution imaging techniques, such as the adaptive optics system at the Keck telescopes, [20] to study star-forming regions and the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way known as Sagittarius A*. [21] She uses the kinematics of stars near the center of the Milky Way as a probe to investigate this region. [22] The high resolution of the Keck telescopes [23] gave a significant improvement over the first major study of galactic center kinematics by Reinhard Genzel's group. [24]

In 2004, Ghez was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2012, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. [25] [26] In 2019, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). [27]

Ghez has appeared in many television documentaries produced by networks such as the BBC, Discovery Channel, and The History Channel. In 2006 she was in an episode of the PBS series Nova . [28] She was identified as a Science Hero by The My Hero Project. [12] In 2000, Discover magazine listed Ghez as one of 20 promising young American scientists in their respective fields. [2]

Black hole at the Galactic Center (Sgr A*)

By imaging the Galactic Center at infrared wavelengths, Ghez and her colleagues have been able to peer through heavy dust that blocks visible light, to reveal images of the center of the Milky Way. Thanks to the 10-meter aperture of the W.M. Keck Telescope and the use of adaptive optics to correct for the turbulence of the atmosphere, these images of the Galactic Center are at very high spatial resolution and have made it possible to follow the orbits of stars around the black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). The partial orbits of many stars orbiting the black hole at the Galactic Center have been observed. One of the stars, S2, has made a complete elliptical orbit since detailed observations began in 1995. Several decades more will be required to completely document the orbits of some of these stars. These measurements may provide a test of the theory of general relativity. In October 2012, a second star, S0-102, was identified by her team at UCLA, orbiting the Galactic Center. [29] Using Kepler's third law, Ghez's team used the orbital motion to show that the mass of Sgr A* is 4.1±0.6 million solar masses. [30] Because the Galactic Center where Sgr A* is located, is one hundred times closer than M31 where the next nearest supermassive black hole (M31*) is, [31] it is one of the best demonstrated cases for a supermassive black hole. [32] [33]

In 2020, Ghez shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Roger Penrose and Reinhard Genzel, for their discoveries relating to black holes. [4] Ghez and Genzel were awarded one half of the prize for their discovery that a supermassive black hole most likely governs the orbits of stars at the center of the Milky Way. [34] Ghez was the fourth woman to win the physics Nobel since its inception, being preceded by Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), and Donna Strickland (2018). [3]

Awards

Selected publications

Articles

Books

Personal life

Ghez has two sons. [47] Ghez is an active swimmer in the UCLA Masters Swim Club. [48] [49]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supermassive black hole</span> Largest type of black hole

A supermassive black hole is the largest type of black hole, with its mass being on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions to billions, of times the mass of the Sun (M☉). Black holes are a class of astronomical objects that have undergone gravitational collapse, leaving behind spheroidal regions of space from which nothing can escape, not even light. Observational evidence indicates that almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. For example, the Milky Way galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, corresponding to the radio source Sagittarius A*. Accretion of interstellar gas onto supermassive black holes is the process responsible for powering active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and quasars.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Galactic Center</span> Rotational center of the Milky Way galaxy

The Galactic Center is the rotational center and the barycenter of the Milky Way. Its central massive object is a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses, which is called Sagittarius A*, a compact radio source which is almost exactly at the galactic rotational center. The Galactic Center is approximately 8 kiloparsecs (26,000 ly) away from Earth in the direction of the constellations Sagittarius, Ophiuchus, and Scorpius, where the Milky Way appears brightest, visually close to the Butterfly Cluster (M6) or the star Shaula, south to the Pipe Nebula.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Galactic bulge</span> Tightly packed group of stars within a larger formation

In astronomy, a galactic bulge is a tightly packed group of stars within a larger star formation. The term almost exclusively refers to the central group of stars found in most spiral galaxies. Bulges were historically thought to be elliptical galaxies that happened to have a disk of stars around them, but high-resolution images using the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed that many bulges lie at the heart of a spiral galaxy. It is now thought that there are at least two types of bulges: bulges that are like ellipticals and bulges that are like spiral galaxies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intermediate-mass black hole</span> Class of black holes with a mass range of 100 to 100000 solar masses

An intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) is a class of black hole with mass in the range 102–105 solar masses: significantly more than stellar black holes but less than the 105–109 solar mass supermassive black holes. Several IMBH candidate objects have been discovered in the Milky Way galaxy and others nearby, based on indirect gas cloud velocity and accretion disk spectra observations of various evidentiary strength.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sagittarius A*</span> Black hole at the center of the Milky Way

Sagittarius A*, abbreviated Sgr A*, is the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. Viewed from Earth, it is located near the border of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius, about 5.6° south of the ecliptic, visually close to the Butterfly Cluster (M6) and Lambda Scorpii.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Milky Way</span> Galaxy containing the Solar System

The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. The term Milky Way is a translation of the Latin via lactea, from the Greek γαλαξίας κύκλος, meaning "milky circle". From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from within. Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610. Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe. Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Doust Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gravitational-wave astronomy</span> Branch of astronomy using gravitational waves

Gravitational-wave astronomy is an emerging field of science, concerning the observations of gravitational waves to collect relatively unique data and make inferences about objects such as neutron stars and black holes, events such as supernovae, and processes including those of the early universe shortly after the Big Bang.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reinhard Genzel</span> German astrophysicist (born 1952)

Reinhard Genzel is a German astrophysicist, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, a professor at LMU and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy", which he shared with Andrea Ghez and Roger Penrose. In a 2021 interview given to Federal University of Pará in Brazil, Genzel recalls his journey as a physicist; the influence of his father, Ludwig Genzel; his experiences working with Charles H. Townes; and more.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">S2 (star)</span> Star orbiting close to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way

S2, also known as S0–2, is a star in the star cluster close to the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), orbiting it with a period of 16.0518 years, a semi-major axis of about 970 au, and a pericenter distance of 17 light hours – an orbit with a period only about 30% longer than that of Jupiter around the Sun, but coming no closer than about four times the distance of Neptune from the Sun. The mass when the star first formed is estimated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) to have been approximately 14 M☉. Based on its spectral type, it probably has a mass of 10 to 15 solar masses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sagittarius A</span> Radio source at center of the Milky Way

Sagittarius A is a complex radio source at the center of the Milky Way, which contains a supermassive black hole. It is located in the constellation Sagittarius, and is hidden from view at optical wavelengths by large clouds of cosmic dust in the spiral arms of the Milky Way. The dust lane that obscures the Galactic Center from a vantage point around the Sun causes the Great Rift through the bright bulge of the galaxy.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a large telescope array consisting of a global network of radio telescopes. The EHT project combines data from several very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) stations around Earth, which form a combined array with an angular resolution sufficient to observe objects the size of a supermassive black hole's event horizon. The project's observational targets include the two black holes with the largest angular diameter as observed from Earth: the black hole at the center of the supergiant elliptical galaxy Messier 87, and Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way.

S55 is a star that is located very close to the centre of the Milky Way, near the radio source Sagittarius A*, orbiting it with an orbital period of 12.8 years. Until 2019, when the star S62 became the new record holder, it was the star with the shortest known period orbiting the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. This beat the record of 16 years previously set by S2. The star was identified by a University of California, Los Angeles team headed by Andrea M. Ghez. At its periapsis, its speed reaches 1.7% of the speed of light. At that point it is 246 astronomical units from the centre, while the black hole radius is only a small fraction of that size. It passed that point in 2009 and will be there again in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bahcall–Wolf cusp</span>

Bahcall–Wolf cusp refers to a particular distribution of stars around a massive black hole at the center of a galaxy or globular cluster. If the nucleus containing the black hole is sufficiently old, exchange of orbital energy between stars drives their distribution toward a characteristic form, such that the density of stars, ρ, varies with distance from the black hole, r, as

Daryl Haggard is an American-Canadian astronomer and associate professor of physics in the Department of Physics at McGill University and the McGill Space Institute.

Robert Michael Rich is an American astrophysicist. He obtained his B.A. at Pomona College in 1979 and earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1986 under thesis supervisor Jeremy R. Mould. He was a Carnegie Fellow at Carnegie/DTM until 1988 when he joined the faculty of Columbia University where he was the doctoral thesis adviser to Neil deGrasse Tyson, and is on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark R. Morris</span> American astrophysicist

Mark R. Morris is an American astrophysicist. He earned his B.A. magna cum laude at the University of California, Riverside and his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Chicago. He did his postdoctoral work at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory, California Institute of Technology, and was on the faculty of the Department of Physics at Columbia University. Since 1985 he has been a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

S62 is a star in the cluster surrounding Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. S62 orbits Sgr A* in 9.9 years, the shortest known orbital period of any star around Sgr A*. The previous record holder, S55 has a 12.8-year period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sagittarius A* cluster</span> Star cluster orbiting Sagittarius A*

The Sagittarius A* cluster is the cluster of stars in close orbit around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The individual stars are often listed as "S-stars", but their names and IDs are not formalized, and stars can have different numbers in different catalogues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Eisenhauer</span> German astronomer

Frank Eisenhauer is a German astronomer and astrophysicist, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), and a professor at Technical University of Munich. He is best known for his contributions to interferometry and spectroscopy and the study of the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

References

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  2. 1 2 Speed Weed, William (January 19, 2000). "20 Young Scientists to Watch". Discover Magazine . Retrieved March 6, 2008.
  3. 1 2 "Facts on the Nobel Prize in Physics". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved October 6, 2020.
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  5. ↑ Overbye, Dennis; Taylor, Derrick Bryson (October 6, 2020). "Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to 3 Scientists for Work on Black Holes – The prize was awarded half to Roger Penrose for showing how black holes could form and half to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for discovering a supermassive object at the Milky Way's center". The New York Times . Retrieved October 6, 2020.
  6. 1 2 Yasuda, Anita (2015). Astronomy: Cool Women in Space. Nomad Press. ISBN   978-1619303270 – via Google Books.
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  9. ↑ Chi spregia il giorno delle piccole cose? mevakshederekh.info
  10. ↑ "Oral history interview with Susanne Ghez". www.aaa.si.edu. January 25, 2011.
  11. ↑ "Alumni Award Winners Announced". University of Chicago. May 16, 2013.
  12. 1 2 Jennifer Lauren Lee. "Science Hero:Andrea Mia Ghez". The My Hero Project . Retrieved September 23, 2009.
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  14. ↑ Susan Lewis (October 31, 2006). "Galactic Explorer Andrea Ghez". NOVA.
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  18. 1 2 Dangremond, Sam (2022). "Reaching for the Stars" (PDF). The Review. St. Anthony Hall (Spring): 19.
  19. ↑ Ghez, Andrea (1993). The Multiplicity of T Tauri Stars in the Star Forming Regions Taurus-Auriga and Ophiuchus-Scorpius: A 2.2μm Speckle Imaging Survey (PhD thesis). California Institute of Technology. OCLC   437065967. ProQuest   304056481.
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  25. ↑ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved March 29, 2021.
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  27. 1 2 "APS Fellow Archive" . Retrieved September 24, 2019.
  28. ↑ "Andrea M. Ghez cv" (PDF). UCLA . Retrieved March 20, 2008.
  29. ↑ Wolpert, Stuart. "UCLA astronomers discover star racing around black hole at center of our galaxy". UCLA Newsroom. Archived from the original on March 15, 2014. Retrieved October 6, 2012.
  30. ↑ Ghez, A. M.; Salim, S.; Weinberg, N. N.; Lu, J. R.; Do, T.; Dunn, J. K.; Matthews, K.; Morris, M.; Yelda, S.; Becklin, E. E.; Kremenek, T.; Milosavljevic, M.; Naiman, J. (December 20, 2008). "Measuring Distance and Properties of the Milky Way's Central Supermassive Black Hole with Stellar Orbits". The Astrophysical Journal. 689 (2): 1044–1062. arXiv: 0808.2870 . Bibcode:2008ApJ...689.1044G. doi:10.1086/592738. S2CID   18335611.
  31. ↑ Eckart, Andreas; Schödel, Rainer; et al. (September 2006). "The Galactic Centre: The Flare Activity of SgrA* and High-Resolution Explorations of Dusty Stars" (PDF). The Messenger. European Southern Observatory. 125: 2–5.
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  34. ↑ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved October 6, 2020.
  35. 1 2 "Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy". American Astronomical Society. Archived from the original on February 28, 2008. Retrieved March 20, 2008.
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  37. ↑ "UCLA Galactic Center Group / SELECTED HONORS & AWARDS". www.astro.ucla.edu. 1995–2017. Retrieved October 4, 2021.
  38. ↑ "Maria Goeppert Mayer Award". www.aps.org.
  39. ↑ "Honors and Awards received by IGPP/UCLA Faculty and Research Staff". UCLA. Archived from the original on February 4, 2008. Retrieved March 20, 2008.
  40. ↑ "Astronomer Andrea Ghez awarded Gold Shield prize". University of California, Santa Cruz. Archived from the original on July 9, 2008. Retrieved March 20, 2008.
  41. ↑ "UCLA astronomer Andrea Ghez named a 2008 MacArthur Fellow". UCLA. Archived from the original on September 24, 2008. Retrieved September 23, 2008.
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  43. ↑ "Newsroom". Archived from the original on October 9, 2018. Retrieved October 8, 2018.
  44. ↑ "Andrea Ghez to receive Royal Society's Bakerian Medal".
  45. ↑ "Honorary degree recipients for 2019 announced". The University of Oxford. Retrieved June 26, 2019.
  46. ↑ "AAS Fellows". AAS. Retrieved September 28, 2020.
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  48. ↑ "Poster Project, Biographies". www.math.sunysb.edu.
  49. ↑ "UCLA Masters Swimmer Andrea Ghez Wins Nobel Prize in Physics". SwimSwam. October 6, 2020. Retrieved December 21, 2020.
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