we don’t have the physics to describe
what a black hole is because it leads to
a paradox a breakdown in our
understanding of how the universe works
we only have four fundamental forces to
describe how the universe works gravity
of those four is probably the one that
we had the most intuition for you throw
something up it comes back down but it’s
actually the least explored Einstein
really recognized that gravitational
fields are equivalent to talking about
space and time not being separate
entities I science notice that in
certain situations Newtonian laws of
physics don’t seem to hold and that’s
why I’m syan developed his theory of
general relativity we know that general
relativity may not be a complete
description of physics and so in order
to figure out where it’s incomplete you
want to test it in regions that people
have been tested before
so people have tested general TV on
earth in the solar system but never
around a black hole that’s four million
times the mass of the site the first
question I was interested in was is
there a supermassive black hole at the
center of our galaxy if you had asked me
would I still be doing this project 20
odd years later when we first started I
would have just laughed at you I grew up
hearing the word no all the time you’re
a girl you can’t do it you’re a girl
there’s no way you can get into MIT
there’s no way you can get into Caltech
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I think I developed a passion for
proving people wrong
we have been able to increase the
evidence for supermassive black holes by
a factor of 10 million
and we’ve done this by watching how
stars move my favorite star name is so2
and it makes its journey every 16 years
we’re at this point where it’s closest
to the black hole and is experiencing
the strongest pull of gravity so we have
this first opportunity to get a direct
measurement of how Einstein theory of
general relativity works near a
supermassive black hole
what we’ve found this summer is that
general relativity does actually
describe the motion of the stars around
the supermassive black hole that’s a
transformational change in our
understanding about not only the
existence of supermassive black holes
but the physics and astrophysics
associated with black holes
a’dreea to me it’s a brilliant scientist
her dedication and her persistence
really has been a heartless project in
order to have the patience and the level
of detail required to do this work
when I was young I wanted to be the
first woman on the moon but I think at
the same time I also wanted to be a
ballerina
I just became much more infatuated with
ideas rather than the physicality of
moving myself it’s very poetic that we
actually see the stars in motion doing
this dance around the black hole
so what we want to do is we want to
improve our ability to see the star like
our Sun the center of the galaxy because
I think that’s when we’ll have the full
view of how this dance really works
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you
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