Andrea Ghez

Andrea Ghez

Born: June 16, 1965, New York City, U.S.

 

Andrea Ghez is an American astronomer who was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics for her discovery of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. She shared the prize with British mathematician Roger Penrose and German astronomer Reinhard Genzel. She was the fourth woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Physics, after Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), and Donna Strickland (2018).

Andrea Mia Ghez’ father, Gilbert Ghez was of Jewish heritage, born in Rome, Italy, to a family originally from Tunisia and Frankfurt, Germany. Her mother, Susanne (née Gayton) was from an Irish Catholic family from North Attleborough, Massachusetts.

In 1969, her father completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University and accepted a position at the University of Chicago, where as the child of a faculty member Ghez was able to attend the Laboratory School. The Apollo program Moon landings inspired Ghez to aspire to be the first female astronaut, and her mother encouraged that goal by purchasing a telescope for her. 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. She received a PhD under the direction of Gerry Neugebauer at the California Institute of Technology in 1992. She is married to Tom LaTourette, a geologist at the RAND corporation, and they have two sons.

Ghez found a way to find proof that the suspicions that our galaxy had a supermassive black hole at its center were true. To do this she needed access to the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, and to use its adaptive optics, that compensate for atmospheric turbulence, to produce high resolution images of the galactic center.

Her request for access to the Keck telescope was initially refused because her proposal was thought to be unlikely to produce useful results. But Ghez was persistent and was eventually allowed her observing time on the Keck.

Her proposal was to use infrared wavelengths that could see through the dust at the center of the galaxy to take images of stars near the center to see their motions. In this way, over a number of years, the paths of several stars were plotted and were seen to orbit an unseen object that had an estimated mass of 4.1 million solar masses, a black hole we call Sagittarius A*. It was for this work that she received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020, only the fourth woman to receive this honor.

In 2004, Ghez was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2012, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. 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.