Page 12 - MidWeek - Feb 3, 2021

12 MIDWEEK FEBRUARY 3, 2021
F rom W.M. Keck Ob- servatory on Hawai‘i Island, Andrea Ghez made the pioneering discov- ery that our galaxy has at its center a supermassive black hole — known as Sagittarius
black hole about once every 10,000 years or so.
to support solid claims. “We moved the case for supermassive black holes to certainty,” Ghez explains of
“We think they’re intimate- ly connected to the formation and evolution of our galaxy,” she continues. “It’s a central component, like it being the heart of the galaxy, or the key
The question of supermas- sive black holes, particularly those in the center of a gal- axy, has been around for decades, but only within the past 30 years has technology im-
the recent discovery.
Andrea Ghez
PHOTO COURTESY UCLA GALACTIC CENTER GROUP
A* (pronounced A-Star). While tropes in movies and TV series describe black holes as gluttons of the cosmos that inhale everything in sight and grow to larger-than-life pro- portions, the UCL A physics and astronomy professor says these cultural myths reflect a general misunderstanding of
thing that sustains it.” Furthermore, she found
environment around a black hole didn’t look anything like what was expected, leav- ing researchers with more questions than answers.
these dense points in space. “They get a very bad name as sort of a cosmic vacuum cleaner,” says Ghez, laure- ate of the 2020 Nobel Prize in
the tip of the iceberg. The center of our galaxy has become such an amazing
proved enough
that
the
“It just tells us that there’s so much more to learn,” she excitedly adds. “It’s all bene- fited by improving our tech- nology. Today, we only see
place.”
Physics.
Black holes, she explains,
SEE PAGE 17
Andrea Ghez and members of the UCLA Galactic Center Group at W.M. Keck Observatory’s telescope facility on Mauna Kea. PHOTO COURTESY UCLA GALACTIC CENTER GROUP
are strong sources of gravity that force celestial ob-
jects to orbit around
them. As far as things getting “sucked in,”
Ghez adds that a star will only fall into a
// BY NICOLE MONTON // MIDWEEK COVER STORY