Andrea M. Ghez

So-

Um, for the, that was Andrea Ghez-

That's right

... and cohort for The Sagittarius A* star Milky Way

You need something light, some source of light.

And so stars were providing that for Andrea Ghez, who shared in the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

She couldn't take a picture of it, but she watched stars for over 15 years orbiting this tiny nothingness.

[laughs] And, um, and so she needed the star to map the space time.

Yeah.

Starting in the early 1990s, two independent teams of astronomers, one in Germany led by Reinhard Genzel, and one in the United States led by Andrea Ghez.

They decided to use the largest telescopes on Earth to track individual stars at the very center of the galaxy.

But as I mentioned, they faced those massive obstacles.

Exactly.

So a super massive black hole was literally the only physical explanation that fit the data.

And that undeniable decades-long body of work is what earned Genzel and Ghez a shared half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Wow.

And I actually wish it was more trained on Apple stuff.

Now, on the other hand, when I asked Siri AI whether physics Nobel laureate and my personal hero, Dr. Andrea Ghez, and her team were the group who discovered and tracked the star S301 with an even faster elliptical orbit around the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, Siri AI easily and quickly explained that it was the team of her Nobel co-laureate.

Wasn't the answer I wanted, but it also gave me more detail about what telescope was used, the Very Large Telescope Interferometer in Chile, and information on how fast this star is going.

It's over 8% the speed of light.

In 2019, scientists dropped the first portrait of the M87 black hole, a super massive beast 6 billion times the mass of the sun.

Just three years later, scientists used the work of Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize for mathematically proving a super massive black hole existed in our galaxy, to reveal something much more intimate.

This photo of Sagittarius A*, the super massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way that's located just 26,000 light years from Earth.

Imagine you spend 30 years tracking stars orbiting an invisible object at impossible speeds, pretty sure that something with 4 million times the mass of the sun was hiding at the center of our galaxy, and then finally seeing it.

In 2019, scientists revealed the first portrait of the black hole M87, a supermassive beast 6 billion times the mass of the sun.

Only three years later, scientists used the work of Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize for mathematically proving that a supermassive black hole existed in our galaxy, to reveal something much more intimate.

this photo of Sagittarius O'Rear, the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, which is located only 26,000 light years from Earth.

Imagine that you spend 30 years tracking stars orbiting an invisible object at impossible speeds, almost certain that something with 4 million times the mass of the Sun was hidden in the center of our galaxy and then finally see it.