Andrea Ghez

Her family moved from New York to Chicago when she was a child, and Ghez attended the University of Chicago Lab School. The Apollo program Moon landings inspired Ghez to aspire to be the first female astronaut, and her mother encouraged that goal. Her most influential female role model was her high school chemistry teacher. She began college by majoring in mathematics, then changed to physics. She received a BS in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987 and her Ph.D. under the direction of Gerry Neugebauer at the California Institute of Technology in 1992.

By imaging the Galactic Center at infrared wavelengths, Ghez and her colleagues have been able to peer through heavy dust that blocks visible light, to reveal images of the center of the Milky Way. Thanks to the 10 metres (33 ft) aperture of the W.M. Keck Telescope and the use of adaptive optics to correct for the turbulence of the atmosphere, these images of the Galactic Center are at very high spatial resolution and have made it possible to follow the orbits of stars around the black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). The partial orbits of many stars orbiting the black hole at the Galactic Center have been observed. One of the stars, S2, has made a complete elliptical orbit since detailed observations began in 1995. Several decades more will be required to completely document the orbits of some of these stars. These measurements may provide a test of the theory of general relativity. In October 2012, a second star, S0-102, was identified by her team at UCLA, orbiting the Galactic Center. Using Kepler's third law, Ghez's team used the orbital motion to show that the mass of Sgr A* is 4.1±0.6 million solar masses. Because the Galactic Center where Sgr A* is located, is one hundred times closer than M31 where the next nearest supermassive black hole M31* is, it is one of the best demonstrated cases for a supermassive black hole.

In 2004, Ghez was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2019, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).

Ghez has appeared in many television documentaries produced by networks such as the BBC, Discovery Channel, and The History Channel. In 2006 she was in an episode of the PBS series Nova. She was identified as a Science Hero by The My Hero Project. In 2000, Discover magazine listed Ghez as one of 20 promising young American scientists in their respective fields.

In 2020, Ghez shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Roger Penrose and Reinhard Genzel, for their discoveries relating to black holes. Ghez and Genzel were awarded one half of the prize for their discovery that a supermassive black hole most likely governs the orbits of stars at the center of the Milky Way. Ghez was the fourth woman to win the physics Nobel since its inception, being preceded by Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), and Donna Strickland (2018).

Physics Today

Happy Birthday Andrea Ghez! The UCLA astronomer was born in New York City in 1965. For more than two decades Ghez has used the Keck telescope in Hawaii to study the bustling center of the Milky Way....