SHEPERD DOELEMAN
       HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Black holes are cosmic objects so small and dense, that nothing, not even light can escape their gravitational pull. Until recently, no one had ever seen what a black hole actually looked like. Einstein's theories predict that a distant observer should see a ring of light encircling the black hole, which forms when radiation emitted by infalling hot gas is lensed by the extreme gravity near the event horizon. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a global array of radio dishes, linked together by a network of atomic clocks to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope that can resolve the nearest supermassive black holes where this ring feature may be measured. On April 10th, 2019, the EHT project reported success: we have imaged a black hole, and have seen the predicted strong gravitational lensing that confirms the theory of General Relativity at the boundary of a black hole. This talk will cover how this was accomplished, details of the first results, as well as some future directions.

About the Speaker:

Shep Doeleman received his bachelor's degree from Reed College in 1986 and then spent a year in Antarctica conducting space-science experiments at McMurdo Station on the Ross Ice Shelf. With an appreciation for the challenges and rewards of instrumental work in difficult circumstances, he pursued his doctorate in astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After a research visit to the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy through a DAAD German Academic Exchange grant, he returned to MIT Haystack Observatory to develop a research program of millimeter/submillimeter-wavelength VLBI and eventually served as the observatory's assistant director. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2012 and moved to the Center for Astrophysics that same year. He is now a Harvard University Senior Research Fellow and Astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. In addition to directing the EHT, Doeleman is a founding member and Assistant Director for Observation of Harvard's interdisciplinary Black Hole Initiative.