SWIMMING THROUGH SPACE

Water in a swimming pool distorts our vision because it is a turbulent medium. The Earth’s atmosphere is also a turbulent swirling medium full of temperature fluctuations. Andrea Ghez, a Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, uses infrared speckle imaging to compensate for these atmospheric distortions. It’s like putting glasses on a telescope: clean sharp and detailed images of stars and galaxies are obtained. Ghez studies young binary star systems and also the innermost region of the Milky Way galaxy. Her research has changed basic concepts about star formation and has provided the best evidence yet that the galactic center contains a super-massive black hole.