Andrea Ghez was born on 16 June 1965 in New York, USA. Inspired by the 1969 moon landings, as a child she wished to become the first woman on the moon. She attended universities in Massachusetts and California before joining UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) in 1994, where she is now a staff member. Her career has focused on Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The work has involved observing stars near the galactic centre to infer the properties of the black hole.
The work began with measuring the positions and motions of stars. The first 11 years of these observations used the Near Infrared Camera of the W. M. Keck I telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Individual images would be useless because of speckles — spots on the image caused by atmospheric turbulence. To follow the orbits of stars, Ghez took a series of 10 000 images, 0.1 seconds apart, and stacked them, mitigating the atmospheric effects. However, the camera was not designed for such a task and there were fears that it might break. Later measurements used adaptive optics, a technology involving mirrors whose surfaces rapidly change shape to correct for atmospheric distortions. Ghez’s work has helped make adaptive optics a powerful tool for astronomers.
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