Smadar Naoz

  • Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy
  • UCLA
  • 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.

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 […]

  • Lighting Up Supermassive Black Holes: What Happens When a Star Venture Too Close to a Monster

    Almost every galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole at its heart with a mass between a million to a billion solar masses. Surrounding these monsters are dense environments of stars and stellar remnants. When a star ventures too close to one of these monsters, it is torn apart, potentially lighting up the darkest places in […]

  • 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 […]