May 9, 2005
Astronomer Andrea Ghez will give the annual
Halliday Lecture on May 17
By Tim Stephens
Renowned astronomer Andrea Ghez will describe how she showed
that our galaxy revolves around a supermassive black hole when
she gives the annual Halliday Lecture at UCSC on Tuesday, May
17.
Andrea Ghez's lecture is being held in conjunction with
the dedication of UCSC's Laboratory for Adaptive Optics.
Photo: Todd Cheney/UCLA |
Ghez's talk, "Unveiling a Supermassive Black Hole at the
Center of Our Galaxy," will take place at 7:30 p.m. in
the Media Theater on the UCSC campus. The event is free and
open to the public.
Ghez is a professor of astronomy at UCLA and one of the world's
leading observational astrophysicists. Her research focuses
on the origin and early life of stars and planets, as well as
the distribution and nature of the matter at the center of our
galaxy. Her observations have helped to resolve an issue explored
by astronomers over many decades--whether or not there is a
black hole at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
From her measurements of the orbital dynamics of stars near
the galactic center, Ghez demonstrated the existence of a central,
dark concentration of mass with a density more than 10 million
times larger than the largest earlier estimates. The only explanation
consistent with these observations is the existence of a supermassive
black hole, with a mass more than 4 million times that of the
Sun.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, Ghez is also affiliated with the
Center for Adaptive Optics based at UCSC. Her lecture is being
held in conjunction with the dedication of UCSC's Laboratory
for Adaptive Optics, a new facility for developing innovative
instrumentation for adaptive optics applications in astronomy.
Ghez has received numerous awards and honors, including the
2004 Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, the Newton Lacy
Pierce and Annie J. Cannon Prizes of the American Astronomical
Society, and the Maria Goeppert-Mayer award of the American
Physical Society. She was named one of the top 20 scientists
in the country under age 40 in Discover magazine's 20th
anniversary issue.
The Halliday Lecture Series is sponsored by UCSC's Department
of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the UC Observatories/Lick
Observatory. It is made possible by the generous support of
John Halliday, a trustee of the UC Santa Cruz Foundation, to
promote public awareness and appreciation for astronomy and
astrophysics.
For more information about this event, please call (831) 459-1438.
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