[HN Gopher] How Andrea Ghez won the Nobel for an experiment nobo...
___________________________________________________________________
How Andrea Ghez won the Nobel for an experiment nobody thought
would work
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 64 points
Date : 2020-10-10 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| ufmace wrote:
| I do not like this clickbait title. Just tell us what the
| experiment was. This seems designed to build a narrative about
| something rather than telling people about an interesting
| experiment.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Do you guys not read the article at all? How is it clickbait to
| describe what he did - the Nobel Prizes aren't that interesting
| as science goes (good science is good science from the day it
| was published until now), the human side is what draws many to
| an article like this.
|
| There is the "Science is interesting, and if you disagree you
| can fuck off" approach, but why not give it some style.
| neonate wrote:
| Not a 'he'.
| sp332 wrote:
| Well, it's what the article does, so I think that's a fine
| reason to have a title that promises that.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Well, it's what the article does
|
| Barely. I would have liked to know much more about the
| details of the experiment, but also why people were initially
| so skeptical, and what happened to make these people come
| around.
| borngames wrote:
| Determine the (very fast and unusual) orbits of stars
| circling sagittarius a*, thereby inferring its existence
| and mass.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Seconding this. There's a grand total of two sentences vaguely
| describing what she wanted the instrument to do but zero
| information whatsoever about how that differed from its normal
| operation, why nobody thought it would work, or why it posed a
| risk to the instrument. This article is just a bunch of
| compliments toward Dr. Ghez.
| netsharc wrote:
| Well duh, it's an article nicely applauding the person who
| just won a significant prize/recognition, if you wanted to
| find out more about the research you're sitting in front of a
| machine which can help you find that.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| part of getting things done, in science or business or sport or
| art, is being able to convince people to do the things that
| need doing.
|
| there is usually a social / political aspect that has to be
| managed.
| antognini wrote:
| Back when I was in grad school Andreas Ghez gave a colloquium
| talk about her work in my department. The basic idea behind the
| technique she used is that the resolution from images in modern
| telescopes is limited by atmospheric distortions. If you can get
| rid of the distortions, you can get much sharper images, and in
| her case, resolve the stars orbiting Sag A*.
|
| Adaptive optics is one way to reduce distortions from the
| atmopshere. With adaptive optics, you observe some star (or more
| commonly a spot of light created by a laser) and rapidly distort
| one of the mirrors in the optical path to compensate for
| atmospheric fluctuations.
|
| Andrea Ghez went further than this, though. Atmospheric
| fluctuations are fast, but they are not instantaneous. If you can
| take an observation faster than the atmosphere changes, you will
| get a much sharper image. You can sort of imagine that an any
| given instant, a star is a very sharp point of light (or actually
| several points of light due to refraction), but over time, these
| points of light move around randomly over an area to create a
| smeared out image.
|
| Of course, there a number of huge technical difficulties to
| taking these very rapid images. But if you can manage it, you can
| resolve the orbits of stars around the supermassive black hole at
| the center of the Galaxy. (This technique is called speckle
| imaging.)
|
| I also remember her joking that when most astronomers write
| observing proposals, they'll typically apply for a few nights of
| time on a telescope. But she was applying for a few seconds of
| observing time over the course of a decade.
| kinkrtyavimoodh wrote:
| The article is written like an 'in memoriam', except that Dr Ghez
| is actually alive.
|
| Here's what the clickbait headline was referring to--
|
| "NIRC [Near Infrared Camera at Keck Observatory] was never
| designed to do what Andrea needed--an ultrafast readout of images
| and then a restacking of the result to remove the effects of the
| atmosphere's turbulence. But she was not to be denied--and we
| made the changes. And it worked!"
| faitswulff wrote:
| Tangential, but I was surprised that the article kept referring
| to her as "Andrea" instead of Dr. Ghez until the end where the
| author stated that they're friends. From that perspective the
| author likely meant for it to have a warm, friendly tone. At
| the same time, given its publication for a wider audience and
| the occasion, it is perhaps more fitting to refer to Dr. Ghez
| more formally.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-10-10 23:00 UTC)