Jordy Davelaar

Monday Jun 17, 2019, 3:00 PM → 4:00 PM America/New_York

Date: Monday, June 17, 2019

Time: 3:00 PM

Place: 162, 2nd floor auditorium

Speaker: Jordy Davelaar, CCA

Title: The first picture of a black hole

Abstract: The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHTC) revealed the first image of the shadow of the black hole in the center of Messier 87. This provides direct evidence for the existence of supermassive black holes in our universe that have been hypothesized for more than a century. The EHT used an array of radio telescopes scattered over the globe as an interferometer to achieve milli arc-second resolutions, which is needed to resolve the black hole scales. The resulting image shows a black hole with a mass of approximately 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun. of  In this talk I will highlight both the observational and theoretical efforts made by the EHTC to obtain and interpret this spectacular image.