NOVA

The art of being a good scientist is actually having good taste in questions questions that are answerable and interesting I am Andrea Ghez GHz black holes supermassive black holes the most exotic objects in the universe it says child they used to keep me up at night what does it mean that something has no finite size no edge no beginning no end I think my first fascination with science and astronomy and astrophysics came from landing and I was totally fascinated got me hurt there's maybe the confession that not only did I want to be an astronaut but I also wanted to be a ballerina it wasn't obvious to me that I would become a scientist so stars have a life cycle they're born they live and then the most massive stars end up as black holes they are defined by their immense immense amounts of gravity gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it not even light is there a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy matter as it gets close to the black hole due to the very intense gravity starts to move at very high speeds so to prove that there's a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy we're gonna watch the orbits of stars the stars that are as close to the center of the galaxy as possible which means that I want the largest telescope I can possibly get my hands on not a bad place to have to go to work it's the largest telescope in the world which means I can see closer to the center of the galaxy in theory the problem for the Keck telescope is that it's here on earth and we have to see through our atmosphere a total headache for astronomers the stars look like big blobs the Earth's atmosphere is like a circus funhouse mirror so if you look at yourself in the funhouse mirror you look completely distorted and then we introduce a second mirror that's the exact opposite shape to correct for the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere these are a factor of 20 sharper than if you had done nothing and for the first time we can see the center of the galaxy and in particular these stars are the ones that are going to tell us what's at the center of the galaxy so we started off in 1995 and every year since then we've taken an image just take a picture and you watch how things move on the plane of the sky up to ten million miles per hour they're really hauling four million times the mass of the Sun this is the proof that there's a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy and that supermassive black holes really do exist I think I think we have people convinced you