Event-Horizon-Team-2022

• The Event Horizon Team created the first ever image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy
• Panelists:
  • moderator Ellen Stofan, Smithsonian Under Secretary for Science
  • Kari Haworth CTO at CFA
  • astrophysicists Angelo Ricarte and Paul Tiede
  • Shep Doeleman
• the EHT is really a virtual telescope that brings in images from multiple telescopes from around the world
• requires:
  • multiple radio telescopes
  • each with a hydrogen maser clock
  • hard drive that ships the data to a central correlator
    • 80 terabyte packs of disks
  • very long baseline interferometry
• m87 was in a giant elliptical galaxy
  • center was pretty simple
• m87
  • size our solar system, 6 billion times more dense than our sun
• milky way
  • Saggitarius A black hole
  • size of orbit of mercury, 1000 times more dense
  • matter orbits a lot faster around SgA since it’s so much smaller
• what’s next for the EHT?
  • key questions i black hole science
  • how do we make sense of the dynamic environment around the black hole?
    • making movies of what’s happening around these blackholes