Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2021
Volume 66, Number 5
Saturday–Tuesday, April 17–20, 2021; Virtual; Time Zone: Central Daylight Time, USA
Session A01: Kavli Foundation Keynote Plenary: Nobel Prize SessionInvited Live Plenary Prize/Award Undergrad Friendly
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Sponsoring Units: APS Chair: Deirdre Shoemaker, April Meeting 2021 Program Chair |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 8:15AM - 8:30AM Live |
A01.00001: Welcome and Introduction Jonathan A. Bagger, Sylvester James Gates, Jr., Deirdre Shoemaker Jonathan A. Bagger (APS CEO); Sylvester James Gates, Jr. (2021 APS President); Deirdre Shoemaker (April Meeting 2021 Program Committee Chair). [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 8:30AM - 9:06AM Live |
A01.00002: A 40-Year Journey Invited Speaker: Reinhard Genzel More than one hundred years ago, Albert Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity (GR). One year later, Karl Schwarzschild solved the GR equations for a non-rotating, spherical mass distribution; if this mass is sufficiently compact, even light cannot escape from within the so-called event horizon, and there is a mass singularity at the center. The theoretical concept of a 'black hole' was born, and was refined in the next decades by work of Penrose, Wheeler, Kerr, Hawking and many others. First indirect evidence for the existence of such black holes in our Universe came from observations of compact X-ray binaries and distant luminous quasars. I will discuss the forty year journey, which my colleagues and I have been undertaking to study the mass distribution in the Center of our Milky Way from ever more precise, long term studies of the motions of gas and stars as test particles of the space time. These studies show the existence of a four million solar mass object, which must be a single massive black hole, beyond any reasonable doubt. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 9:06AM - 9:42AM Live |
A01.00003: Capturing a Supermassive Black Hole Invited Speaker: Andrea Ghez The proximity of our Galaxy's center presents a unique opportunity to study a galactic nucleus with orders of magnitude higher spatial resolution than can be brought to bear on any other galaxy. After more than a decade of diffraction-limited imaging on large ground-based telescopes, the case for a supermassive black hole at the Galactic center has gone from a possibility to a certainty, thanks to measurements of individual stellar orbits. The rapidity with which these stars move on small-scale orbits indicates a source of tremendous gravity and provides the best evidence that supermassive black holes, which confront and challenge our knowledge of fundamental physics, do exist in the Universe. This work was made possible through the use of speckle imaging techniques, which corrects for the blurring effects of the earth's atmosphere in post-processing and allowed the first diffraction-limited images to be produced with these large ground-based telescopes. Further progress in high-angular resolution imaging techniques on large, ground- based telescopes has resulted in the more sophisticated technology of adaptive optics, which corrects for these effects in real time. This has increased the power of imaging by an order of magnitude and permitted spectroscopic study at high resolution on these telescopes for the first time. With adaptive optics, high resolution studies of the Galactic center have shown that what happens near a supermassive back hole is quite different than what theoretical models have predicted, which changes many of our notions on how galaxies form and evolve over time. By continuing to push on the cutting-edge of high-resolution technology, we have been able to capture the orbital motions of stars with sufficient precision to test Einstein’s General theory of Relativity in a regime that has never been probed before. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 17, 2021 9:42AM - 10:18AM Live |
A01.00004: Fundamental Lessons from Black-Hole Physics Invited Speaker: Roger Penrose TBD [Preview Abstract] |
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