How do you find an ‘unseeable’ black hole?

There’s a black hole lurking at the center of our galaxy.

Andrea Ghez, an astrophysicist from the University of California, Los Angeles, uncovered the black hole and in 2020 she won a Nobel Prize for the discovery.

“Today, we think that most, if not all, galaxies harbor black holes at their centers,” says Ghez, “and that this black hole plays a really essential part in both the formation of the galaxy—our own is the Milky Way—and the evolution of galaxies, which are really the fundamental building blocks of our universe.”

But how do you go about finding something that emits no light? How do you see the unseeable?

In this University of Chicago Big Brains podcast episode, Ghez explains how she proved this supermassive black hole was hiding in the Milky Way and answers all our pressing questions including: Are we being sucked into this monster? And could researching it prove Einstein’s theory of relativity is actually wrong?

You can find the transcript of this episode here. You can also subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.

Source: University of Chicago

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