How to Photograph a Black Hole | Binge Thinking
About this Event
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TOPIC: How to Photograph a Black Hole
SPEAKER: Dr. Sheperd Doeleman (Center of Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian)
For more than a century, black holes existed only in theory. Scientists knew they were there from indirect evidence - stars orbiting an invisible mass, bursts of X-rays, and, more recently, gravitational waves, but no one had ever seen one. After all, how do you photograph something that doesn't even let light escape?
In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration changed that by capturing the first-ever image of a black hole. Achieving this required treating the challenge as a planet-scale engineering problem. By linking radio telescopes across the globe and synchronizing them with atomic clocks, an international team created a virtual telescope the size of Earth, giving it the resolving power needed to image one of the smallest, darkest, and most distant objects in the universe.
In this talk, Dr. Sheperd Doeleman shares the story behind one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 21st century, revealing how breakthroughs in astrophysics, engineering, and international collaboration made the impossible possible.
Topics include:
- Why black holes were once considered impossible to observe directly
- How radio telescopes around the world became a single Earth-sized virtual telescope
- What the famous image actually shows: a ring of light surrounding a black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun
- How Einstein's theory of gravity predicted the black hole's appearance with remarkable accuracy
- Why this image provides one of the strongest tests of gravity in its most extreme environment
- What's next: capturing the first movies of black holes
Beyond the technology, this is also a story of global collaboration. Scientists, engineers, and institutions from around the world worked together toward a shared vision, building on the ideas of pioneers such as Newton, Einstein, Schwarzschild, and Stephen Hawking. In many ways, their discoveries were all "in the room" when the first image finally came into focus.
This talk explores how humanity accomplished what once seemed impossible: photographing the unseeable.
About the Speaker
Dr. Sheperd "Shep" Doeleman is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian and the Founding Director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).
He famously led the international collaboration of over 200 researchers that captured the first-ever direct image of a supermassive black hole in 2019, and he currently leads the next-generation EHT (ngEHT) project. Dr. Doeleman earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and previously co-founded Harvard's interdisciplinary Black Hole Initiative. His highest professional honors for this historic scientific breakthrough include the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the 2021 Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, the 2020 Bruno Rossi Prize, and the 2020 Lancelot M. Berkeley Prize from the American Astronomical Society.
Agenda
5:00 PM — Doors Open & Drinks
5:30 PM — Lecture Begins
6:10 PM — Audience Q&A
6:30 PM — Drinks & Conversation
7:00 PM — Event Ends
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 32.95
