The notion of a black hole started as a mathematical construct, a consequence of Einstein’s theory of Relativity. They are entities so massive that even light bends inward towards them, never to be seen.  We know black holes exist because they effect the things around them—leaving clues that help scientists like Professor Meg Urry piece together a picture of what they are. As an observational astronomer, she says:

“The theorists can make a lot of things happen. But to me I have to see it in the data to believe it.” 

Dr. Urry is not just interested in any black hole, but supermassive black holes that sit at the center of galaxies. She has observed that these black holes have unusual properties, including a special relationship to the galaxy in which the black hole lives. 

Supermassive is an interesting adjective for a black hole, because black holes already have a reputation for being very massive objects. So what’s supermassive? Imagine trying to hide something like the Earth in your refrigerator. You’d have to do a lot of squishing to get it to fit. If you succeed, you’d have a black hole. Now imagine trying to hide the sun and one million of its best friends in your refrigerator. You’d have to do quite a bit more squishing.  But this time you’d have a supermassive black hole.
 
She explains that a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy pulls matter towards it, but because such a giant has so much pull, it causes the matter coming towards it to fly into a very fast and tight orbit around the black hole without actually crashing into it the way you’d imagine. Think back to the skating championships in the last winter Olympics. The elegant skater, with her arms outstretched, starts a beautiful spin. Then she pulls her arms inward and her spinning rate increases. That’s angular momentum. And that’s the same sort of increase in speed that happens around the supermassive black holes. 

Due to this speeding up, some material goes towards the hole, but to preserve angular momentum, some material flies outward as energy. Professor Urry and her colleagues spend a lot of time detecting this energy. These types of supermassive black holes are what powers active galactic nuclei (AGN)—where the center of a galaxy produces more radiation than the rest of the galaxy itself. 

Professor Urry points out that one of the most exciting discoveries in the last 15 years or so is that the mass of a supermassive black hole seems to know about the mass of the galaxy it’s in. How could that be? She explains there could be a feedback loop whereby the black hole emits radiation as it grows, thereby ionizing gas that forms stars. 

Indeed, we are in exciting times! In the podcast Speaking with : Meg Urry on supermassive black holes, Meg Urry talks about a merger of black holes would create gravitational waves. At the time of the podcast (October, 2015), no one had reported detecting a gravitational wave. Unbeknownst to the world, scientists detected a gravitation wave on September 14, 2015. It took several months for them to verify it was a true result. The wave  indicates a black-hole merger. Just recently, there was a report of Supermassive Black Holes Observed in Close Dance.

Professor Urry is not only an amazing researcher, but she is also a champion of science and a champion of women in Astronomy. See her recent piece Trump's proposed STEM budget cuts a grave mistake  where she says:
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"Revolutionary scientific discoveries can seem obscure and even unimportant when they are first made -- but can have enormous impact decades downstream, reaching into every part of our lives and rendering unimaginable a time when they were not there."

Visit her Women in Science page to learn more about her extensive work promoting women and minorities in science. Check out her card in the Notable Women in Physical Sciences deck. She is the 6 of ♥️.

It’s easy to think of the Earth of being so big it can take care of itself. It’s a gentle giant who lets us walk all over it, prod it, poke it, and rearrange its parts. But now we know our actions over the centuries have had an effect. How do you convince the world to make course corrections? That’s just one of the challenges that Professor Katharine Hayhoe tackles as an  atmospheric scientist who studies climate change.  She directs the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and hosts the PBS Digital Studios web series Global Weirding. 

Earlier in her life, thinking science is cool,  Dr. Hayhoe aspired to be an astrophysicist. While studying quasars, she took a class in climate sciences and discovered that modeling the climate IS all about physics. When she realized she could also help people, her destiny as a climate scientist was sealed. 

With two-thirds of the population living in areas that will be flooded when sea levels rise, she realized the importance of  researching climate effects and then getting society to put mitigating solutions in place. She believes we have an obligation to lessen the misery of the people who will be effected. Many of these people are some of the poorest in the world.

It hasn’t been easy to convince people to act, or even to agree that climate change is real. Just take a look at the recent withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord. During an interview with Evan Smith on KQED, Professor Hayhoe discussed the challenges of explaining climate science. 

Weather, she pointed out,  goes up and down, but climate has cycles  20 to 30 years in length. So short term weather trends can trick people into ignoring the long term cycles. She says people often reach the wrong conclusion and gives this example:

“The Titanic can’t be sinking because my end just went up 200 feet.”

To find out more about Professor Hayhoe, visit her website. Watch the video Climate Change Evangelist on NOVA's Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers. Check out her card in the Notable Women in Physical Sciences deck. She is the 7 of ♦️.

“'Are we alone?' Humans have been asking [this question] forever. The probability of success is difficult to estimate but if we never search the chance of success is zero.” — Jill Tarter

I love the “But if…” part of that quote. It applies to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and it also applies to everything else in life. Dr. Tarter has thrown her heart in the quest for SETI, starting with her work on the SERENDIP project as a graduate student, continuing as a Project Scientist in the NASA SETI program,  then on to Director of the SETI Research program for the SETI Institute. 

Dr. Tarter retired from the SETI Research directorship   in 2012 to focus full time on fundraising for SETI and to continue public education about the search for sentient beings in the universe. 

The SETI Institute depends on private funding for its existence. Its primary instrument for looking for alien signals is the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in Northern California, named for its chief funder, Paul Allen. Instead of using a gigantic dish to scoop up radio waves from space, the ATA uses many smaller dishes and digitally ties them together. This is effectively equivalent to have one extremely large dish. The smaller dishes are inexpensive. It’s also easy to add more dishes as funding permits, thereby increasing the size of the virtual dish. Dr. Tarter’s fundraising focuses on keeping the ATA operational and on track for expansion. 

You’re probably wondering what the odds are of finding a signal that originates from a sentient being. There is an equation for that—the Drake Equation. Dr. Tarter does an excellent job explaining in the TEDEd video Calculating the Odds of Intelligent Life.

To find out more about her work and how you can help, watch the TED Talk she gave after being awarded the TED Prize in 2009, called "Join the SETI search".
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Check out her card in the Notable Women in Physical Sciences deck. She is the Queen of ♥️.

​We see the things we see—everyday objects, stars, planets in the solar system, and so on—because photons reveal their existence. These visible objects make up a small percentage of the universe. Most of our universe contains things we can’t see—dark matter and dark energy. That’s the world of Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan. 

Although studying invisible objects may seem like a magical art, it isn’t. Dark matter and dark energy have an effect on their surroundings. It is possible to figure out the size and distribution of dark matter by looking at their effects. It’s sort of like "seeing" magnetism. If you watched a video of a nail moving across a flat table, seemingly on its own power, you’d probably conclude there is a magnet under the table. The movement of the nail would give you a clue as to the size and placement of the magnet. That’s the sort of approach that Dr. Natarajan uses.

Take a look at the large image to the left—the blue arc surrounding the white dot. That’s a photo taken by the Hubble space telescope. The blue arc is an Einstein ring, which is an example of gravitational lensing. Gravity can bend space so much that light doesn’t travel in a straight line. Thus gravity acts like a lens, but instead of focusing the object, it distorts the shape. (Think of looking through someone else’s eyeglasses.) That blue arc is not actually a blue arc. To find out what it really is, Dr. Natarajan “surgically cleans up” the image. The operation not only shows what the original image looks like, but helps her deduce the size and distribution of dark matter.

The three smaller images on right of the larger one are her “surgical” results. The top image is the real object. The middle object is galaxy that has a dark matter halo. The bottom image is what results when the dark matter halo distorts the light from the blue image at the top.  

“ALL THAT WE KNOW of the universe we get from observing photons... But dark matter, which makes up 90 percent of the total mass in the universe, is called dark because it neither emits nor reflects photons—and because of our ignorance of what it is.” ~Priyamvada Natarajan

To find out more details about Dr. Natarajan’s research, watch:  Solving Dark Matter and Dark Energy, a talk given for Seminars About Long-term Thinking hosted by The Long Now Foundation. 

Read her book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos to get an understanding of recent discoveries in astronomy.

Check out her card in the Notable Women in Physical Sciences deck. She is the 3 of  ♥️.

Dr. Lisa Randall works at the edge of human knowledge, between our three-dimensional world and the world of multiple dimensions. She arrived at the edge seeking an explanation for a gravitational mystery. Why is gravity so weak? 

The times I've found myself tumbling down a ski slope, carrying a heavy load, or watching the earth coming at me fast after jumping out of a plane, the weakness of gravity never came to mind. I felt that its strength could crush or kill me. But it turns out that physicists look at strength at small scales, very small—atomic and subatomic—scales. There, gravity is a very weak player, getting aced out by electromagnetism and the strong and weak forces. Professor Randall, and other physicists, wonder why these forces are not all the same strength. 

She and a colleague proposed the Randall-Sundrum model. In a nutshell, our three-dimensional world exists in a higher-dimension universe that has a warped geometry. What do these other dimensions look like? Although Dr. Randall agrees that we can’t picture them, she says “The fact you can’t picture them doesn’t mean that you can’t imagine them or derive them mathematically.” (Interview with Charlie Rose)  To understand unseen dimensions, she suggests reading  Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Edwin Abbott’s classic novel describes a two-dimensional world and how three-dimensional objects would appear to the inhabitants of that world.

In the extra dimensions Dr. Randall proposes, gravity would be a stronger force. One possible scenario is that gravity has its own sort of area—in physics lingo, a brane (from membrane)—where it is very strong. But in our area (a different brane), gravity “leaks in” and is weak. Her research may sound like science fiction,  but science, she says, is much more interesting than fiction. If her theory pans out, it will revolutionize our thinking about time and space.

Her book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions explains this theory in detail. A faster way to understand the details of her theory is to watch her interview with Charlie Rose.  

Dr. Randall says her fascination with particle physics was an evolution. As a child, she enjoyed math problems because they had definite answers. In high school she found she liked physics, even though no one in her family was particularly physics-oriented nor did she have role models. Science itself fascinated her. 

Her research has reached beyond the community of Physics scholars. Composer Hèctor Parra was so taken with Professor Randall’s work that he asked her to write the libretto for an opera--Hypermusic Prologue: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes. Opera in the Fifth Dimension gives a good overview of the story.   The soprano is willing to explore other dimensions and eventually experiences the unification of the four forces of nature. The baritone clings to the standard theory until he has a brief brush with another dimension. Then he is convinced. The composer uses electronics to achieve time-warping vocal effects, which results in a quite wild, avant garde sound. 

Professor Randall will be a guest speaker at STARMUS IV in June, 2017. Check out her card in the Notable Women in Physical Sciences deck. She is the Ace of ♠.

​-Bunny Laden

Photo: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Starshade. Credit: NASA

Your next vacation spot? Credit: NASA

Professor Sara Seager is devoting the rest of her life to answering the question: Are we alone?  Finding an Earth twin might seem like a crazy quest, but when you look at the history of great discoveries, you’ll find that most began with a far out idea. 

Finding a planet isn’t easy because the star (or stars) around which a planet orbits shine too brightly to let you see anything nearby. As Professor Seager says: “It’s like us here in Boston looking for a firefly next to a searchlight in San Francisco.”  (Interview with New Scientist ) So how do you discover planets?

Right now scientists look for indirect effects. A planet’s gravity tugs at its sun, causing very tiny, but measurable, differences in the star’s center of gravity.  Instead, Sara wants to view planets directly. She is working on the JPL starshade project, which will use a space telescope and a sophisticated shade to block a star's light. It’s a tricky technical challenge. First of all, the shade must have a precisely manufactured shape to account for the effects of light diffraction. As you can see in the artist’s rendition, the shade looks like a flower with delicate petals. Secondly, the shade must be located an exact distance from the space telescope so the shade blocks all the light. 

Professor Seager has identified planets whose “variety is simply astonishing.” The NASA Exoplanet Travel Bureau even has posters for many of these planets that give you an idea of what space travelers should expect. For example, on Kepler 186f, you could find red grass instead of green due to the lack of conditions for photosynthesis and chlorophyll, which gives Earth plants their green color. 

You might think that Sara Seager was born with a quest for finding Earth-like planets. But she didn’t even think about astronomy until she attended an Astronomy Day open house at the University of Toronto. Even then, it was years later that she got hooked on planet hunting.

“I knew I was different from other people from day one, I just didn’t know how the difference would manifest,” she says. “I spent more time daydreaming than anybody I know, and I was such a risk taker. I felt like I always had to live on the edge.” (Interview with Smithsonian Magazine)

When she set her goal to find an Earth twin, her colleagues were doubtful. She points out that the nature of science is to be skeptical. Over time, your either have data to support your theory or you don’t. Her discoveries thus far indicate that if there is an Earth twin, it is within our capability to find it.

​These quotes inspire me because they speak to pursuing your passion:

“As a scientist, you have this immense curiosity, stubbornness, resolute will that you will go forward no matter what other people say.” (TED Talk)

“It’s so liberating not to care about what other people are thinking.” (Interview with Smithsonian Magazine)

Professor Seager will be a guest speaker at STARMUS IV in June, 2017. Check out her card in the Notable Women in Physical Sciences deck. She is the Jack of ♠. I highly recommend watching her TED Talk The Search for Planets Beyond Our Solar System. 

-Bunny Laden

Dr. Sandra Magnus is one of the 58 women on planet Earth who’ve had the privilege of flying in space. Like many of us, she dreamed of being an astronaut as a girl. Her dream came true, but her path was circuitous. Not knowing much about career possibilities aa a high school student, she said:

"I thought engineers were people who drive trains, really, quite frankly, because there was no one in my family who was an engineer."  Preflight Interview, 2008 

Sandra earned a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Missouri University of Science and Technology. At university, she discovered that engineers build things, not drive trains. After graduation, she worked on aircraft and stealth technology at McDonnell Douglas. In the evenings, she studied for, and completed, a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering. 

She was fascinated by the materials used to build airplanes. The materials have to be strong and lightweight and, in the case of stealth technology, difficult to detect on radar. Wanting to learn more, Sandra enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech where she successfully earned a doctorate in materials science. It’s only then that Dr. Magnus applied to the Astronaut Office. 

Her meandering path is an inspiration to me. None of us has a complete enough picture of the world when we are in high school to choose a lifelong career. Sandra didn’t know about engineers, or materials science. As she lived life and pursued the things that fascinated her, she found a career that truly spoke to who she is. 

In a preflight interview, the interviewer asked her about the danger of flying in space. Sandra pointed out the great benefit to humanity.  It’s something that we don’t often think about, but the engineering challenges of space also provide great advancements on Earth. She gave the example that the portable medical equipment used in ambulances is the result of the space program miniaturizing electronics for some of its earlier programs. Keeping that in mind, she says: “How could you not want to be a part of something like that.”

Dr. Magnus will be a guest speaker at STARMUS IV in June, 2017. Check out her card in the Notable Women in Physical Sciences deck. She is the King of Hearts ♥️.

If you are curious as to what a day in space is like for an astronaut, check out Sandra Magnus' Journal: A Typical Day. 

​-BunnyLaden