Andrea M. Ghez Quotes & Sayings

“Gravity wins over all other known forces.”

“The key to proving that there's a black hole is showing that there's a tremendous amount of mass in a very small volume. And you can do that with the motions of stars.”

“Black holes are very exotic objects. Technically, a black hole puts a huge amount of mass inside of zero volume. So our understanding of the center of black holes doesn't make sense, which is a big clue to physicists that we don't have our physics quite right.”

“Our galaxy's pretty ordinary, garden-variety. So if we believe our galaxy has a super massive black hole, that tells us that most, if not all, galaxies host such a black hole at their centers.”

“Fortunately, most things around the supermassive black hole are just going to go around it. They're going to orbit it. They don't actually get sucked in.”

“The star S0-2 orbits around Sgr A* every 16 years and will go through its closest approach in 2018. That's an opportunity to test Einstein's General Relativity theory through very precise measurements of this star's short period orbit.”

“An ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star's life.”

“The atmosphere is great for people - it allows us to survive - but it's a real headache for astronomers.”

“Astronomers are obsessed with building larger and larger telescopes. There are two promises that we make with bigger telescopes: that they can see fainter things and that they see more detail. But it's been really hard to follow through on that second promise because of atmospheric distortion.”

“One of the key differences between galaxies with super massive black holes is whether or not the black holes are lit up, because they are basically bingeing on a lot of material in its surroundings.”