Category: EHT

EHT: A Planetary Effort to Photograph a Black Hole (SXSW 2019 Panel)

EHT: A Planetary Effort to Photograph a Black Hole (SXSW 2019 Panel)

Recording of a series of 4 presentations and a Question & Answer session from the panel named “EHT: A Planetary Effort to Photograph a Black Hole” at the 2019 SXSW festival that took place on March 8–17, 2019 in Austin, Texas, USA. Speakers.

1) Sheperd Doeleman, EHT Project Director, Senior Astronomer, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

2) Dimitrios Psaltis, Professor of Astronomy and Physics, University of Arizona

3) Sera Markoff, Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics and Astroparticle Physics, University of Amsterdam

4) Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University

Find a collection of Twitter posts related to the EHT panel at SXSW under #blackholesatSXSW

4 things we’ll learn from the first closeup image of a black hole

Event Horizon Telescope data are giving scientists an image of the Milky Way’s behemoth

BY LISA GROSSMAN
09:58AM, MARCH 29, 2019

We’re about to see the first close-up of a black hole.

The Event Horizon Telescope, a network of eight radio observatories spanning the globe, has set its sights on a pair of behemoths: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center, and an even more massive black hole 53.5 million light-years away in galaxy M87 (SN Online: 4/5/17).

In April 2017, the observatories teamed up to observe the black holes’ event horizons, the boundary beyond which gravity is so extreme that even light can’t escape (SN: 5/31/14, p. 16). After almost two years of rendering the data, scientists are gearing up to release the first images in April.

Here’s what scientists hope those images can tell us.

Read more…