Andrea Ghez, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA and the world’s leading expert on the black hole at the center of our galaxy visited the department for two days this week. She delivered the 2019 Sturm Lecture to an audience of 200+ on Tuesday night and gave a colloquium to the Astronomy Department on Wednesday. She also had breakfast and lunch meetings with astronomy department students and with the Wesleyan Women in Science program. Her visit was co-sponsored by the Center for Integrative Science. Ghez described her amazing studies of the stars orbiting the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way, showing how the work is testing General Relativity and challenging ideas of galaxy evolution.
