Andrea Gage, a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the fourth woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics.
U.S. For astronomer Andrea Gage, who has won the Nobel Physics Prize this year, what makes black holes so attractive is how difficult it is to imagine them.
If she were asked to explain them to the average person, her standard answer is: “A black hole is something whose gravitational pull is so intense that nothing can escape it, not even light.”
It doesn’t always satisfy people’s curiosity.
“Very few people understand what a black hole is – but I think a lot of people are fascinated by it,” a University of California professor at Los Angeles told AFP by phone that she received a co-award for the prize this year, along with Roger Great. Britain’s Penrose and Germany’s Reinhard Ganzel.
This summer, Gaz’s team celebrated the 25th anniversary of the start of their project, using a giant telescope in Hawaii, using new optical techniques and countless calculations to measure a supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Star. “
“It’s very hard to imagine a black hole,” he said. “The laws of physics are so different near the black hole on Earth that we have no intuition for the things we are looking for.”
“So I can think about it mathematically, I can think of it abstractly, but it’s very difficult to make a picture, because you get this combination of space and time,” he added.
The way to “see” a black hole, which is invisible by definition, is to observe the orbits of the stars around it.
Ghez says that 25 years later, she has in her mind a detailed map in the minds of some of the brightest people in a tight orbit close to Sagittarius A *.
“I think all your stars are like children whose names you know and recognize, but every year it’s a little different,” the astronomer said.
A star, called S2, completes its orbit in less than 16 years, accelerating its approach to black holes and slowing as it moves away.
Our sun takes 200 million years to complete its orbit – dinosaurs were orbiting the earth when we started our current lap.
‘Torn’
Does the professor think he likes to fall out of a black hole?
“We won’t survive,” he said.
“So if you think about falling into the foot of a black hole first, the first thing that will happen is that the gravitational pull is so strong in your foot than in your head that you will actually tear.
“We won’t feel anything because we don’t exist, we won’t live it, our foundations will crumble. I don’t want to do this.”
Gaze received her PhD from Caltech in 1992 and has been at UCLA since 1994, where she co-directed the Galactic Center Group.
She is confident that more of the mysteries surrounding the black hole will be solved in her lifetime.
“I think this is a field of physics where the rate of discovery is getting faster and faster because technology is evolving so fast.”
The last woman to win the Nobel Physics Prize was Canadian Donna Strickland two years ago. Before that, there were two other women – Maria Gopert Meyer in 1962 and Marie Curie in 1903.
A total of four women against more than 200 men.
“The field has long been dominated by men,” Gaze said.
“But today, many women are entering the field. And so I am happy to be able to serve as a role model for young women.”
Black Holes: The star-studded revelations reveal their secrets
20 2020 AFP
Testimonial: En: U.S. The 25-year-old Odyssey (October 6, 2020) from a black hole in the center of the Nobel laureate galaxy was obtained from https://phys.org/news/2020-10-nobel-winner-year-odyssey-black from October 6, 2020. HTML
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