Research Expertise and Interest
black holes, star and cluster formation, galactic centers, adaptive optics, astronomy, instrumentation, infrared instrumentation, astrometry
Research Description
Jessica Lu runs the Moving Universe Lab (muLab), which searches for free-floating stellar-mass black holes in our Milky Way galaxy using gravitational lensing. Her group also studies how the birth, life, and death of stars changes in extreme environments such as in massive young clusters and around the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center. These areas of research require high resolution images, time-domain photometry (star brightness), and precise astrometry (star positions). The muLab utilizes observations and measurements from both space telescopes such as Hubble, JWST and ground-based telescopes equipped with adaptive optics (AO) such as the W. M. Keck Observatory. Adaptive optics is a technology that corrects the blurring effects of the Earth's atmosphere to produce sharper images of the Universe. Prof. Lu works on several instrumentation teams that aim to improve AO on the ground including the Thirty Meter Telescope IRIS instrument, the 'imaka project to test very wide-field AO, and the W.M. Keck Observatory AO systems. Prof. Lu also works on improving astrometry and photometry with the Roman Space Telescope and leads the CuRIOS satellite constellation project to continuously monitor most of the sky for transient events associated with black hole and star microlensing, mergers, or explosions. Finally, Prof. Lu also co-leads the AstroTech instrumentation summer school aimed at broadening participation in the development and construction of astronomical instrumentation.
In the News
Astronomers May Have Detected a ‘Dark’ Free-Floating Black Hole
AI Reveals Unsuspected Math Underlying Search for Exoplanets
Milky Way’s central black hole puts Einstein’s theories to the test
Featured in the Media
Einstein's theory of general relativity, published more than 100 years ago, has been tentatively confirmed in the most comprehensive test of the theory to date. The study was conducted near the massive black hole at the center of our galaxy by a team of UCLA researchers that included Jessica Lu, now an assistant astronomy professor at Berkeley. "Einstein's right, at least for now," said UCLA physics and astronomy professor Andrea Ghez, one of the study's co-lead authors. "We can absolutely rule out Newton's law of gravity. Our observations are consistent with Einstein's theory of general relativity. However, his theory is definitely showing vulnerability. It cannot fully explain gravity inside a black hole, and at some point we will need to move beyond Einstein's theory to a more comprehensive theory of gravity that explains what a black hole is." For more on this, see our press release at Berkeley News. Stories on this topic appeared in more than a dozen sources around the world, including Technology.org, Graffio Tech (Italy), SciTech Daily, and FARS News Agency (Iran).