Smadar Naoz

  • Professor / UCLA Department of Physics & Astronomy
  • http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~snaoz/

Dr. Smadar Naoz is a Professor at the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UCLA and studies a broad range of topics, including cosmology and black holes. Before coming to UCLA, she was an Einstein Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Professor Naoz contributes to diversity, equity, and inclusion through various activities and is dedicated to mentorship, having mentored over 50 undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs over the years.

Recommended grade levels for this talk: 3rd-5th

Sessions

  • The Three-Body Problem

    The ‘Three-Body Problem’ has gained popularity thanks to a book series by Liu Cixin and a Netflix show, but it’s actually a deep question in physics. It explores how three objects, like stars or planets, move under the influence of each other’s gravity. The tricky part? There isn’t a simple formula to predict what will […]

  • Seeing the Unseeable: How We Discover Black Holes

    Black holes are invisible, yet we know they are out there—from the remains of dead stars to giants millions of times heavier than the Sun. But how can we study something that swallows even light? In this talk, we’ll explore the clever ways astronomers find black holes: by watching stars dance around them, listening to […]

  • Gravitational Wave Sources at the Heart of Galaxies

    Gravitational-wave emissions are small ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are emitted when two masses accelerate toward each other. The detections of gravitational-wave emission from two colliding black holes by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) transformed the way we sense our Universe and raised many puzzles in understanding how black holes meet. Smadar […]