Andrea Ghez, Nobel Laureate and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, will present the 2026 McDonnell Distinguished Public Lecture.
Learn about new developments in the study of supermassive black holes. 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 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 provides 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.
Andrea M. Ghez, professor of Physics & Astronomy at UCLA and the Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine chair in Astrophysics, is one of the world’s leading experts in observational astrophysics and is director of UCLA’s Galactic Center Group.
In 2020, she became the fourth woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for her independent discovery of a supermassive compact object, now generally recognized to be a black hole in the Milky Way’s galactic center. Her work on the orbits of stars at the center of the Milky Way has opened a new approach to studying black holes, and her group is currently focused on using this approach to understand the physics of gravity near a black hole and the role that black holes play in the formation and evolution of galaxies.