Andrea M. Ghez Quotes

Fortunately, most things around the supermassive black hole are just going to go around it. They're going to orbit it. They don't actually get sucked in.

How do you observe something you can't see? This is the basic question of somebody who's interested in finding and studying black holes. Because black holes are objects whose pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it, not even light, so you can't see it directly.

Black holes destroy any objects that happen to fall victim to their gravitational pull.

Black holes are enigmatic astronomical objects, areas where the gravity is so immense that it has warped spacetime so that not even light can escape.

Each black hole spins on its axis like the Earth spins. That spin creates two vortexes of twisting space, somewhat like vortexes in a bathtub or a whirlpool.

We have this interesting problem with black holes. What is a black hole? It is a region of space where you have mass that's confined to zero volume, which means that the density is infinitely large, which means we have no way of describing, really, what a black hole is!

Black holes can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song.

An ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star's life.

We've seen black holes, which is already wonderful. We also expect to see the merger of neutron stars, and that was a thing that actually gave this field a certain credibility when it was discovered that there were pairs of neutron stars in our galaxy, and people stopped laughing at us when that was found out.

We knew about black holes in other ways, and we knew about neutron stars - well, those are the two things that ultimately got seen.

Evidence has been mounting for the key role that black holes play in the process of galaxy formation. But it now appears that they are likely the prima donnas of this space opera.

Wormholes - if you don't have something threading through them to hold them open, the walls will basically collapse so fast that nothing can go through them.

I originally wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. Then I had this huge fear of black holes because my brother learned a bunch of stuff about it, and he's like, 'Oh, yeah, if you go into one you're never coming back.'

It's very, very exciting that it worked out in the end that we are actually detecting things and actually adding to the knowledge, through gravitational waves, of what goes on in the universe.

My work on black holes was on the connection between black holes and elementary particles.

For reasons probably related to the popular vision of Albert Einstein and, also, the threat posed by black holes in comic books and science fiction, our gravitational wave discoveries have had an amazing public impact.

I actually believe more in outer space in Virginia, because I can look up at the sky and count the stars.

Hubble has really opened our eyes to what the universe is made of, its structure, and has helped us learn how little we know about the universe.

Observing gravitational waves would yield an enormous amount of information about the phenomena of strong-field gravity. If we could detect black holes collide, that would be amazing.

This is the first real evidence that we've seen now of high gravitational field strengths: monstrous things like stars moving at the velocity of light, smashing into each other, and making the geometry of space-time turn into some sort of washing machine.

The tail of the comet always points straight away from the sun, in antisolar direction. Sometimes the tail trails behind, but sometimes it's perpendicular, and sometimes it's ahead of the comet like a headlight on a railroad locomotive.

Every field of astrophysics - whether it's our local neighborhood of planets, nearby stars and their attendant planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, out to the edge of the universe - every field has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble.

Finding the first seed black holes could help reveal how the relation between black holes and their host galaxies evolved over time.

The early universe was a dusty place, and the UV radiation from the hot, young black holes and stars would get enshrouded by dust, re-radiated, and scattered into red wavelengths like infra-red, causing these objects to remain obscured.

My work indicated that if we consider smaller and smaller black holes, at some stage, the properties of black holes become indistinguishable from those of elementary particles.