Black Holes: An Up Close and Personal Look

The Event Horizon Telescope is an experiment that is being performed on a large and ever-increasing array of radio telescopes that span the Earth, from Hawaii to Chile and from the South Pole to Arizona. In April of this year, the EHT collaboration has performed its first set of observations with this full array of telescopes in order to take the first ever picture of a black hole. This unprecedented spatial resolution and the novel methods of this experiment will allow us to get up close and personal with the black hole at the center of our Galaxy, Sagittarius A*, and the black hole at the center of the nearby galaxy M87. The ultimate goal is to test Einstein’s theory of General Relativity by looking for its most bizarre prediction: a shadow that is a direct evidence for the event horizon of a black hole.

Speaker: Feryal Ozel, University of Arizona