Seeing the unseen (from 26,000 light-years away) is a specialty of UCLA astronomer Andrea Ghez. From the highest and coldest mountaintop of Hawaii, home of the Keck Observatory telescopes, using bleeding-edge deep-space-scrying technology, Ghez handily confirmed 30 years of suspicions of what lies at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy -- a supermassive black hole, which sends its satellite stars spinning in orbits approaching the speed of light.
Ghez received a MacArthur "genius grant" in 2008 for her work in surmounting the limitations of earthbound telescopes. Early in her career, she developed a technique known as speckle imaging, which combined many short exposures from a telescope into one much-crisper image. Lately she's been using adaptive optics to further sharpen our view from here -- and compile evidence of young stars at the center of the universe.
"Few people know the center of the Milky Way -- some 26,000 light-years from Earth -- as intimately as Andrea Ghez."
What is Speckle imaging ???? here is the answer !!!
Speckle imaging (also known as video astronomy) describes a range of high-resolution astronomical imaging techniques based either on the shift-and-add ("image stacking") method or on speckle interferometry methods. These techniques can dramatically increase the resolution of ground-based telescopes.
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