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Black hole physics with the Event Horizon Telescope
Feryal Özel, University of Arizona
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The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is an experiment that is being performed on a global array of millimeter wavelength telescopes that span the Earth from Hawaii to Chile and from the South Pole to Arizona. With the full array, it is capable of imaging the event horizons of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Galaxy, Sagittarius A*, and the black hole at the center of M87, with an unprecedented 10 μas resolution. Its goal is to look for the shadow that is direct evidence for a black hole predicted by the theory of General Relativity and to study the processes by which black holes accrete matter and grow in mass. I will discuss the multi-pronged efforts that have enabled the full array observations since 2017 and the theoretical developments in simulating the properties of the black hole accretion flows and their expected images using high performance computing. Interpreting the observations within this theoretical framework will open new horizons in black hole astrophysics.
About Feryal Özel
Feryal Özel is a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on the physics of neutron stars and black holes, as well as to the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies in the early Universe. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is the chair of the NASA Astrophysics Advisory Committee. She is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Maria Goeppert Mayer award from the American Physical Society, Guggenheim Fellowship, Radcliffe Fellowship, and a Miller Institute Visiting Professorship from the University of California in Berkeley. Feryal is the co-chair of the Science and Technology Definition Team for NASA's next large X-ray mission concept Lynx and a member of the Science Council and a group lead for the Event Horizon Telescope. She frequently appears in TV documentaries on PBS, BBC, the History Channel, and CNN International writes scientific articles for the popular press.
Audience: Public
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