Andrea Ghez
Facts
© Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Stefan Bladh.
Andrea Ghez
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020
Born: 16 June 1965, New York, NY, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Prize motivation: “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy”
Prize share: 1/4
Work
A black hole is a supermassive compact object with a gravitational force so large that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. Since nothing, not even light, can escape black holes, they can only be observed by the radiation and the movement of nearby objects. Since the 1990s, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel with their respective research teams, have developed and refined techniques for studying the movement of stars. Observations of stars in the area around Sagittarius A* in the middle of our galaxy, the Milky Way, revealed a super massive black hole.
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