Andrea Ghez: 16th June

Andrea Ghez (born 1965) is an American astronomer who was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics for her discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. 

Professor Ghez in October 2020 [Spencer Lowell]

Ghez received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987 and a doctorate in the same subject from the California Institute of Technology in 1992. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona from 1992 to 1993, and she then became an assistant professor in physics and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1994. She became a full professor in 2000.

 Beginning in 1995, Ghez and her collaborators began using  the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to study stars near the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, where they could identify individual stars and follow their orbits around the galactic centre. They found that the centre of the galaxy was coincident with the bright radio source, Sagittarius A*, which they proved to have a mass about 4 million times that of the Sun and is thus a supermassive black hole.

Ghez has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (often called the “genius grant”), and she was the first woman to receive the prestigious Crafoord Prize in astronomy.