22 Quotes by Andrea M. Ghez

One of the big mysteries about the black hole at the center of the galaxy is, 'Why don't we see emission from matter falling onto the black hole, or, rather, the black hole eating up its surroundings?'

One of the key differences between galaxies with super massive black holes is whether or not the black holes are lit up, because they are basically bingeing on a lot of material in its surroundings.

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.

Our galaxy's pretty ordinary, garden-variety. So if we believe our galaxy has a super massive black hole, that tells us that most, if not all, galaxies host such a black hole at their centers.

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!

Any time things go to infinity in physics, we know we haven't gotten it right.

As an astronomer, I get to ignore the details of the things that we dont understand. Theres a lot of work that we can do on scales that we do understand, and there is actually a finite size that I can associate with a super massive black hole.

The Keck telescope, which is the largest in the world, had opened just before I began my faculty position at UCLA.

Gravity wins over all other known forces.