New Session in the Spring 2022 Webinar Series

BH PIRE has launched a new series bringing the most current Sgr A* research and featuring women pioneering advances in the field.

The new series, A Deep Look Into the Black Hole in the Center of the Milky Way, brings four, one-hour webinars with opportunities for Q&A with researchers bringing major scientific advancements to our understanding of black holes and specifically the unique environment around Sgr A*.

Andrea Ghez, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, 2020 Nobel Prize laureate, provided a new webinar in the current series focusing on advanced imaging techniques using ground-based telescopes to observe the black hole’s influence on nearby s-stars. Professor Ghez discusses the process of developing these techniques plus additional content through the Q&A.

Webinar Overview:

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 and provided the best evidence to date for the existence of these truly exotic objects.  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.  Measurements this past year of stellar orbits at the Galactic Center have provided new insight on how gravity works near a supermassive hole, a new and unexplored regime for this fundamental force of nature.

 

Facilitator: Andrea Ghez, UCLA, Galactic Center Group

Air date: Tuesday, March 29, 2022

This session is part of a monthly series. Subscribe and watch past webinars here:

BH PIRE Science Channel on YouTube