Event Horizon Telescope

That is where the action is, like that's the downtown.

Some of you have probably seen, like, the first images of a black hole from the Event Horizon Telescope, for example.

I mean, I never thought I would see that in my lifetime, I'll be honest.

Like, that was just amazing.

So how can it be done? Harvard astrophysicist Shep Doeleman and a team of 250 researchers achieved this extraordinary feat by linking a group of radio telescopes around the world.

This network, called the Event Horizon Telescope, produced the first image of a supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87, around 55 million light years away, and the first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy.

In this episode, Doliman tells co-host Jan Eleven how he turned the Earth into a telescope capable of seeing a black hole, the incredible level of science and collaboration that was required to achieve this, how the images have furthered our understanding of these exotic objects, and how movies of black holes may be possible by the early 2030s.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta.

So let me tell you about Shep.

Shep is a senior research fellow at Harvard University, the assistant director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, also an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

And he was the founding director of the Event Horizon Telescope Consortium, which is a network of observatories around the world, which gave us the first and only images humanity has ever captured of black holes.

Hmm.

part of a broader set of cuts in astronomy and nuclear and particle physics, which are going to have impacts across the US, across the UK.

Like the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, that's one that was involved in the Event Horizon Telescope, this millimeter wave observatory that's able to perform these microwave, not even microwave, these millimeter wave observations, which they could synchronize with other observations and get these closeup images of black holes.

Well, so yeah, they're no longer gonna be funding that.

So this is like, I don't know what's going on here.

Shep is a senior research fellow at Harvard University, the assistant director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, also an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

And he was the founding director of the Event Horizon Telescope Consortium, which is a network of observatories around the world, which gave us the first and only images humanity has ever captured of black holes.

This sounds like it's going to be a great discussion of science at its best.

Yeah, it's an epic story.

You're talking about connecting these dishes around the globe.

Now, it's over decades that this work really begins in imagination, conception, execution.

But when was the Event Horizon Telescope as a project officially founded?

Well, it depends.

He's an award-winning astrophysicist.

He's the guy who actually went up to make the announcement of the first image, actual image of a black hole from the Event Horizon Telescope.

A fascinating book with a little bit of a spiritual angle to it as well, published by HarperOne.

That'll be yours if you're chosen by Random.org, as Michael Kaspo was this week.

Yeah, well, you can look at the region around it.

So there's the black hole itself, which is hard to image, though we did get a cool image of it with the Event Horizon Telescope.

That was a few years ago.

Really worth checking out.

No, I don't know.

You know, but the thing that's weird about this is we can't easily take direct photos of black holes.

Obviously, Event Horizon Telescope, you can look up those images.

But this is using James Webb to look at the material that's around the black hole.