Dr. Andrea Ghez to present the 2017 Brickwedde Lecture in Physics on 9/19

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The Johns Hopkins University, Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy, is hosting the 2017 Ferdinand G. Brickwedde Lectures in Physics presented by Andrea M. Ghez, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles. The lecture entitled “The Monster at the Heart of our Galaxy” will be held on Tuesday, September 19 at 4 p.m. in the Schafler Auditorium, The Bloomberg Center, Homewood Campus.  The lecture is for a general audience and is open to the public.

The Brickwedde Lectures are mode possible through a contribution by Ferdinand G. Brickwedde and his wife, Langhorne Howard Brickwedde.  A Johns Hopkins Alumnus (BA ’22, MA’24, and Ph.D. in Physics ’25), Professor Brickwedde had a distinguished research and academic career.  Most notably a co-discoverer of Deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen, he was long associated with the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) and was dean of the College of Chemistry and Physics at Pennsylvania State University from 1956-1963.  He was an Evan Pugh Research Professor of Physics Emeritus until his death on March 29, 1989.

Lecture Abstract:

Learn about new developments in the study of supermassive black holes. Through the capture and analysis of twenty years of high-resolution imaging, the UCLA Galactic Center Group has moved the case for a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy from a possibility to a certainty. This was made possible with the first measurements of stellar orbits around a galactic nucleus. Further advances in state-of-the-art of high-resolution imaging technology on the world’s largest telescopes have greatly expanded the power of using stellar orbits to study black holes. Recent observations have revealed an environment around the black hole that is quite unexpected (young stars where there should be none; a lack of old stars where there should be many; and a puzzling new class of objects). Continued measurements of the motions of stars have solved many of the puzzles posed by these perplexing populations of stars. This work is providing insight into how black holes grow and the role that they play in regulating the growth of their host galaxies. Upcoming measurements for 2018 of stellar orbits at the Galactic Center hold the promise of improving our understanding of gravity through tests of Einstein Theory of General Relativity in an unexplored regime.

Speaker Biography:

Andrea M. Ghez, professor of Physics & Astronomy and Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine chair in Astrophysics, is one of the world’s leading experts in observational astrophysics and heads UCLA’s Galactic Center Group.   Best known for her ground-breaking work on the center of our Galaxy, which has led to the best evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes, she has received numerous honors and awards including the Crafoord Prize in Astronomy from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science (she is the first woman to receive a Crafoord prize in any field), Bakerian Medal from the Royal Society of London, a MacArthur Fellowship, election to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Her work on the orbits of stars at the center of the Milky Way has opened a new approach to studying black holes and her group is currently focused on using this approach to understand the physics of gravity near a black hole and the role that black holes plays in the formation and evolution of galaxies.

Advances in high resolution imaging technology enabled Ghez’s work and her group continues to work on pushing the frontiers of these technologies forward.   She serves on several leadership committees for the W. M. Keck Observatory, which hosts the largest telescopes in the world, and the future Thirty Meter Telescope.

Ghez is also very committed to the communication of science to the general public and inspiring young girls into science. Her work can be found in many public outlets including TED, NOVA’s Monster of the Milky Way, Discovery’s Swallowed by a Black Hole, TED, and Griffith Observatory.

Ghez earned her B.S from MIT in 1987, and her PhD from Caltech in 1992 and has been on the faculty at UCLA since 1994.