Dr. Dick Plambeck of UC Berkeley

The Event Horizon Telescope, a Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) array operating at mm radio wavelengths, recently produced the first direct image of a black hole. The image shows a bright ring of radio emission surrounding the black hole's shadow. General Relativity predicts that the ring is roughly 2.5 times the size of the event horizon, the boundary of no return beyond which neither light nor matter can escape the black hole's gravitational pull. The ring is 42 microarcseconds in diameter -- about the size of a poppy seed in New York, viewed from San Francisco. In this talk I will describe the challenges of linking radio telescopes around the world to obtain this image, and what the image tells us about the black hole. 

Biography:

Dick Plambeck is a Research Astronomer at UC Berkeley. He received his PhD in physics from Berkeley, and participated in many of the observing campaigns that led to the creation of the Event Horizon Telescope and its first image of a black hole.