Understanding the Black Hole Image

Understanding the Black Hole Image

with Dr. Geoffrey Crew, Research Scientist at the MIT Haystack Observatory

Two years ago, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration revealed an image that will forever change the way we view black holes. For many, this image of a supermassive black hole at the center of a nearby galaxy (M87) has moved black holes from the realm of imagination into the real world.

As one of the developers of the EHT, Geoff will share some of the story behind the image and discuss how the data was acquired and the image produced. He will also explain the science of the image, so that we can all understand what it tells us about the universe in which we find ourselves.

Read more about the Black Hole in the New York Times Science section.

Dr. Geoffrey Crew is a Research Scientist at the MIT Haystack Observatory. Located in Westford, Massachusetts, Haystack’s focus is to use radio waves to understand the phenomena of space, starting from the upper atmosphere and continuing to the most distant objects in the universe. Crew was trained in plasma physics (the study of the hot, ionized gases that make up most of our universe). In the decades prior to his work at Haystack, he was involved in a number of NASA missions to explore space, extending all the way from the Earth’s magnetosphere and heliosphere to long-range X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy. His work on the EHT started a decade ago and has focused on the instrumentation required by the technique of VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry), which was used to obtain the M87* image. As part of this work, he was a key developer for the ALMA Phasing Project, which brought the ALMA Observatory (located in northern Chile) into the EHT array, enabling the high-resolution observations necessary for the first picture of a black hole.

WATCH A RECORDING OF THIS WEBINAR HERE