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| The Event Horizon Telescope: Observing Black Holes with Schwarzschild-Radius Resolution |
| Dr. Shep Doeleman |
| Thursday, Dec 8, 2011 at 8:00 PM |
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| It is now almost certain that at the center of our Milky Way
Galaxy lies a super massive black hole - 4 million times more massive
than our Sun. Because of its proximity to Earth, this object, known as
Sagittarius A*, presents astronomers with the best opportunity in the
Universe to spatially resolve and image a black hole Event Horizon. To
do this requires using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the
technique whereby radio telescopes around the world are linked together
in a Global phased array. Very short wavelength VLBI observations have
now confirmed structure on ~4 Schwarzschild radius scales within SgrA*,
and have revealed time variability in this source on the same spatial
scales. For the much more massive (6 billion solar mass) black hole
powering the relativistic jet in M87, similarly compact structures have
been detected. I will describe the instrumentation efforts that enable
these observations, discuss what current and future VLBI observations
can tell us about these super-massive black holes, and describe plans
for assembling a submm-VLBI Event Horizon Telescope.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Shep Doeleman is a Principal Research Scientist at MIT and
Assistant Director of the MIT Haystack Observatory in Westford, MA. He
got a BA in Physics from Reed College in Portland, OR, then spent a year
in Antarctica working on upper atmospheric and particle physics
experiments. He got his PhD at MIT working on Very Long Baseline
Interferometry (VLBI), and now uses this technique to resolve the
emission near the event horizon of super massive black holes.
Please join us for a pre-meeting dinner discussion at Changsho, 1712 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA at 6:00pm before the meeting. |
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