Taking Pictures and Making Movies of Supermassive Black Holes

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, formed when radiation emitted by infalling hot gas is lensed by the extreme gravity near the event horizon.

In this Presidential Lecture, Shep Doeleman will present the first results and the future directions of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The EHT is a global array of radio dishes that successfully imaged the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy and the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, both of which exhibit the predicted strong gravitational lensing. Subsequent observations have revealed ordered magnetic fields on horizon scales with implications for how black holes launch relativistic jets of material. What’s next? The next-generation EHT (ngEHT) is a project to expand the EHT in several ways, enabling full-color, high-definition movies of black holes to pursue the next big questions.

Doeleman is the founding director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, which received the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and led the international team that made the first image of a black hole. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Reed College in Oregon, he spent a year in Antarctica conducting space-science experiments, where he got hooked on conducting research in challenging circumstances. He then earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics from MIT. After serving as assistant director of MIT’s Haystack Observatory and receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012, he moved to the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and co-founded the interdisciplinary Black Hole Initiative. He has received the Lancelot M. Berkeley Prize and the Bruno Rossi Prize from the American Astronomical Society as well as the Prix Georges Lemaître. He leads the next-generation EHT (ngEHT) project working to make movies of black holes.