Imaging Black Holes from ground and space

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• Prof Heino Falcke (Radboud University Nijmegen)
• Wednesday 04 March 2026, 16:15-17:15
• Ray Dolby Auditorium, Ray Dolby Centre, Cavendish Laboratory, JJ Thomson Avenue, CB3 0US.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Prof. Eloy de Lera Acedo.

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first-ever image of a black hole, observing its dark shadow in the radio galaxy M87 . In 2022, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way was imaged, validating our predictions made more than two decades ago. This confirmed the presence of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies and provides strong evidence for the presence of an event horizon. The next step is to measure the properties of these black holes, test theories of gravity, and to understand the physics near the event horizon: Are these black holes spinning? What is the structure of accretion flows and jets? Is rotational energy extracted from the black hole to launch plasma jets? Where and how are particles accelerated that produce the radiations we see? To answer these question we will be engaging in campaigns to produce “color movies” of black holes, i.e. make dynamic images of black holes and observe them at multiple frequencies. To do this we are developing new imaging algorithms, new operational models, and new telescopes. The EHT is expanding further. Funded by an ERC Synergy grant,“Black Holistic”, we are now also building the 14m Africa mm-wave telescope (AMT) in Namibia, equipped with multiband receivers for Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) and transients research. In the future space interferometers will improve the results by another order of magnitude and promise even deeper insights into the nature of black holes.

This talk is part of the Cavendish Big Science colloquium series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Cambridge Astronomy Talks
• Ray Dolby Auditorium, Ray Dolby Centre, Cavendish Laboratory, JJ Thomson Avenue, CB3 0US

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