On Thursday, January 16, Prof. Dr. Eduardo Ros from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn will give a lecture on black holes in lecture hall C1 of Paderborn University starting at 4:15 p.m.: "Black holes look like rings: After Messier 87, imaging the center of the Milky way". The lecture will be held in English. All those interested are invited to attend. From 4 p.m., hot drinks and pastries will be available for the audience in front of the lecture hall.
Making images of black holes – the invisible becomes visible
The first image of a supermassive black hole located in the center of our Milky Way was taken with radio telescopes and it was recently released by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration. Those observations are based on observations conducted in 2017 with a global network of radio telescopes, following decades of observations of Active Galactic Nuclei and relativistic jets. These results support an image dominated by a bright, thick ring consistent with the appearance of a rotating, super massive black hole. These results provide direct evidence for the presence of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. They are the second image ever of a black hole, after the results on the nearby galaxy Messier 87. I will show how it was possible to carry out such an observation, the involved challenges, and the implication it has concerning general relativity and astrophysics.
