Keynote: The Event Horizon Telescope Photographing a Black Hole | SciPy 2020 | Andrew Chael

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a network of radio telescopes that spans the globe from Greenland to the South Pole. Using the technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the EHT combines data from these telescopes to synthesize the resolution of a single telescope the size of the Earth. In April 2017 the EHT observed the supermassive black hole in the center of the giant galaxy M87. After years of painstaking calibration, validation, imaging, and modeling of these data, the EHT released its first image: an asymmetric ring of light encircling the black hole's "shadow,” where light is captured by the immense gravitational force exerted by the black hole. In this talk, I will discuss the data, algorithms, and software that went into producing this landmark image. I will also discuss the physical interpretation of the EHT's image, which is consistent with the light emitted by an extremely hot plasma surrounding a seven billion solar mass black hole. I will finally describe how future observations with the EHT will be able to test General Relativity near a black hole's boundary and reveal the connection between supermassive black holes, extragalactic jets, and the evolution of galaxies.

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Dr Chael's main talk starts at 18:00 minutes. You may want to skip to it, if you are not interested in SciPy Conference announcements. I found Dr. Chael's talk to be very cool and amazing.