[이데일리 강민구 기자] “The opportunity to be sure of the existence of black holes also came from scientific curiosity. Scientific progress can only be achieved by finding more questions than answers.”
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UCLA Professor Andrea Guez, who received the ‘2020 Nobel Prize in Physics,’ explained this at the ‘Science Innovation Conference’ hosted by Choi Jong-hyung Academy. Prof. Andrea Guz, together with German astronomer Reinhard Genzel, is a researcher who proved that there is a Sagittarius A black hole at the center of our galaxy that is 4 million times more massive than the Sun. She became the fourth woman to be honored for turning the possibility of a supermassive black hole into certainty.
A black hole is a celestial body of supermassive mass known to absorb all matter, including light, and has a singularity at the center where all laws of nature do not apply. Albert Einstein also questioned the existence of black holes. Meanwhile, research that started with questions about the secrets of galaxies from the birth of the universe continued to prove the existence of supermassive black holes thanks to the development of infrared observation technology over the past 30 years.
He said that he can feel the joy of doing science when unexpected results come out in the process of asking questions and seeking answers. For the past 30 years or so, he has been working to answer the question of the existence of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. He tested the question of supermassive existence from an astrophysical point of view using the terrestrial telescope at the Kek Observatory in Hawaii, which observes the infrared wavelength region. “How Einstein’s general theory of relativity works, which best explains how gravity works, is an interesting question and subject of study from an astronomy or astrophysical point of view,” he said. .
Black hole studies sometimes show that the existing descriptions of the physical world are inaccurate. It is also the background that black holes connect the unknown and unexpected things in the center of our galaxy, and it is also the background that we were able to confirm the fact that normal black holes are bigger than expected and occur more often than expected. There are theories and observations that suggest that stars more than a billion years old must be concentrated around a supermassive black hole, but discoveries have been made that break this framework.
If Professor Andrea Guz used a 10-meter-diameter ground observation telescope to investigate the existence of a supermassive black hole, recently a 30-meter-diameter telescope was introduced, and the James Webb Space Telescope was sent into space to find answers to fundamental questions about the universe. it’s speeding up Research on the next-generation adaptive optical system to overcome resolution issues and image distortion caused by the Earth’s atmosphere is progressing to unravel the secrets of the universe.
Professor Andrea explained, “As the space telescope is looking for answers to cosmological, galactic clustering, and what is the furthest galaxy, terrestrial telescopes can also be developed to uncover more secrets of the universe.”
He continued, “The universe we see is the tip of the iceberg, but I’m happy to be able to observe the stars at the center of our galaxy and ask questions.” “If technology improves, it could lead to more interesting discoveries about the universe.”
