Andrea M. Ghez

I'm interested in finding whether or not there is a really massive, what we like to call 'super massive' black hole at the center of our galaxy. And the reason this is interesting is that it gives us an opportunity to prove whether or not these exotic objects really exist.

The question that I started off with was, I thought, very simple. It was just 'Is there a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way?' But one of the things I love about science is that you always end up with new questions.

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!

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.