Prof. Andrea Ghez
UCLA
"Unveiling the Supermassive Black Hole at Center of our Galaxy"
Abstract: After two decades of diffraction-limited imaging on large ground-based telescopes, the case for a supermassive black hole at the Galactic center has gone from a possibility to a certainty, thanks to measurements of individual stellar orbits. The rapidity with which these stars move on small-scale orbits indicates a source of tremendous gravity and provides the best evidence to date that supermassive black holes, which confront the limit of our knowledge of fundamental physics, do exist in the Universe. Over this time period, tremendous progress in high-angular imaging techniques has allowed precision measurements of the properties of our galaxy's central supermassive blackhole and, in the next few years, will enabled new tests Einstein’s General theory of Relativity in regimes that have never been probed before.
Keywords: Physcis, Astronomy, Heilborn