Halmos College Astronomy Faculty Interviewed about Black Hole Photo.

On April 10, the National Science Foundation announced the first picture of a black hole. NBC channel 6 interviewed Stefan Kautsch, Ph.D., Halmos College’s associate professor of physics and astronomy about the photo.

In the interview, Kautsch stated, “The significance of this radio image is the high-resolution observation of the area of a super-massive black hole in the center of galaxy M87.  The image visualizes the disk of hot gas and dust surrounding the black-hole surface, the so-called event horizon. It is great news for my research on galaxies to show the existence of black holes in galaxy centers.”

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration, was designed to capture images of a black hole. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. This long-sought image provides the strongest evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes and opens a new window onto the study of black holes, their event horizons, and gravity.

The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein’s general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory.