Session Abstract
Black holes are spectacular end products of the fatal attraction of gravity. Residing at the centers of galaxies, the biggest black holes in the universe have masses up to many billion suns. I will describe how simple black holes are, how difficult it is to find them, and what happens when two of them come together to form twins.
Speaker Bio
Chung-Pei Ma is the Judy Chandler Webb Professor in Physical Sciences and Professor of Astronomy and of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her main research area is theoretical and observational extragalactic astronomy and cosmology. Dr. Ma uses luminous matter to investigate the dark components in the universe: dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.