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Supermassive honour
News Interview Shep Doeleman
Supermassive honour The astronomers who took the first ever photo of a black hole have won a $3 million Breakthrough Prize. Leah Crane spoke to the team’s leader
STEPHANIE MITCHELL/HARVARD
Shep Doeleman, head of the Event Horizon Telescope
has now been awarded the $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in recognition of its work. New Scientist spoke with the leader of the collaboration, Shep Doeleman at Harvard University. First things first: how does the EHT work? It basically turns Earth into a telescope. We do that by using radio dishes across the globe that all look at the same black hole at the same time. Then, we take the hard drives from those telescopes and fly them to one place and use a supercomputer to line up all the data. When you do that, it’s like having a telescope as big as Earth. How did it feel to see that image of a black hole for the first time? It was jaw-dropping. It came in waves for us. We first started looking at the data that we had 10 | New Scientist | 14 September 2019
gathered in 2017, and we just saw the raw data in graphs. But even there, we could see signs of what might have been a silhouette of a black hole. We split up into four different groups and each analysed the data separately. When we came together and saw that all four teams had seen this ring, that’s when we began to exhale. We knew that we had it. What do you think is the importance of the image? It is destined to be iconic, I think, just because it was the first time that we’ve seen a black hole, and seeing is believing. We were focused on the science, but it was the resonance of the image across the globe with a curious public that rocked us a little bit on our heels. Scientifically, the first thing that we have done with it is to confirm that Einstein’s theory of gravity holds, to the precision of our measurements, right up to the very edge of a supermassive black hole. We have also started to understand black hole accretion. Do black holes eat voraciously, do
EHT COLLABORATION
AFTER decades of dodgy special effects and artist’s impressions, the world got its first look at a real black hole in April. The image (right) quickly spread around the globe, hitting the front pages of many newspapers. It shows an ethereal ring of orange light around the supermassive black hole at the heart of the M87 galaxy, 55 million light years from Earth. It was taken using the combined power of eight radio observatories around the world by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team. The international group of 387 scientists who took the image
they eat timidly, how do they send out their jets? We’ve started to understand these things. What’s next for the EHT? Scientists are never satisfied and the EHT is no exception. What we’re focusing on now is building out the telescope array so we can try to make videos that show us dynamically how matter orbits the black hole. We think that understanding how these black holes eat, live, exist over time is
And the other winners are… Researchers from around the world have been awarded a total of more than $20 million in this year’s Breakthrough Prizes. The physics winner was the team behind the Event Horizon Telescope (see main interview). There were four winners in the life sciences, each picking up $3 million. They include Jeffrey Friedman at Rockefeller University in New York, who discovered how we regulate body fat genetically and hormonally in 1994. This has led to a greater understanding of obesity.
Also rewarded was David Julius at the University of California, San Francisco, who found mechanisms through which we experience pain, and Virginia Man-Yee Lee at the University of Pennsylvania, for identifying important proteins in dementia and Alzheimer’s. The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics went to Alex Eskin at the University of Chicago. He worked with the late Maryam Mirzakhani on the dynamics and geometry of a complicated mathematical construct called moduli space.
crucial to understanding these monsters and how galaxies interact with them. So we are focusing on building new dishes and maybe even launching telescopes into space. In 20 years, I think that we will have space-based platforms, so that the EHT will not be limited by the size of Earth, which will sharpen our images. I think we’re entering an era of precision imaging of black holes. Why is that so important? There are no deeper questions in the universe than how black holes work. That is because we know that, at their heart, they contain a mystery – of how gravity and quantum mechanics work together. This is the deepest question there is right now. How do you feel about the prize? I know the whole team feels this sense of accomplishment. To have our peers recognise our work, to have a prize like the Breakthrough Prize recognise it, means that it’s not just that we think we did something important – the whole world feels it. I couldn’t be more proud of the team. I just couldn’t be more proud. ❚
Supermassive honour The astronomers who took the first ever photo of a black hole have won a $3 million Breakthrough Prize. Leah Crane spoke to the team’s leader
STEPHANIE MITCHELL/HARVARD
Shep Doeleman, head of the Event Horizon Telescope
has now been awarded the $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in recognition of its work. New Scientist spoke with the leader of the collaboration, Shep Doeleman at Harvard University. First things first: how does the EHT work? It basically turns Earth into a telescope. We do that by using radio dishes across the globe that all look at the same black hole at the same time. Then, we take the hard drives from those telescopes and fly them to one place and use a supercomputer to line up all the data. When you do that, it’s like having a telescope as big as Earth. How did it feel to see that image of a black hole for the first time? It was jaw-dropping. It came in waves for us. We first started looking at the data that we had 10 | New Scientist | 14 September 2019
gathered in 2017, and we just saw the raw data in graphs. But even there, we could see signs of what might have been a silhouette of a black hole. We split up into four different groups and each analysed the data separately. When we came together and saw that all four teams had seen this ring, that’s when we began to exhale. We knew that we had it. What do you think is the importance of the image? It is destined to be iconic, I think, just because it was the first time that we’ve seen a black hole, and seeing is believing. We were focused on the science, but it was the resonance of the image across the globe with a curious public that rocked us a little bit on our heels. Scientifically, the first thing that we have done with it is to confirm that Einstein’s theory of gravity holds, to the precision of our measurements, right up to the very edge of a supermassive black hole. We have also started to understand black hole accretion. Do black holes eat voraciously, do
EHT COLLABORATION
AFTER decades of dodgy special effects and artist’s impressions, the world got its first look at a real black hole in April. The image (right) quickly spread around the globe, hitting the front pages of many newspapers. It shows an ethereal ring of orange light around the supermassive black hole at the heart of the M87 galaxy, 55 million light years from Earth. It was taken using the combined power of eight radio observatories around the world by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team. The international group of 387 scientists who took the image
they eat timidly, how do they send out their jets? We’ve started to understand these things. What’s next for the EHT? Scientists are never satisfied and the EHT is no exception. What we’re focusing on now is building out the telescope array so we can try to make videos that show us dynamically how matter orbits the black hole. We think that understanding how these black holes eat, live, exist over time is
And the other winners are… Researchers from around the world have been awarded a total of more than $20 million in this year’s Breakthrough Prizes. The physics winner was the team behind the Event Horizon Telescope (see main interview). There were four winners in the life sciences, each picking up $3 million. They include Jeffrey Friedman at Rockefeller University in New York, who discovered how we regulate body fat genetically and hormonally in 1994. This has led to a greater understanding of obesity.
Also rewarded was David Julius at the University of California, San Francisco, who found mechanisms through which we experience pain, and Virginia Man-Yee Lee at the University of Pennsylvania, for identifying important proteins in dementia and Alzheimer’s. The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics went to Alex Eskin at the University of Chicago. He worked with the late Maryam Mirzakhani on the dynamics and geometry of a complicated mathematical construct called moduli space.
crucial to understanding these monsters and how galaxies interact with them. So we are focusing on building new dishes and maybe even launching telescopes into space. In 20 years, I think that we will have space-based platforms, so that the EHT will not be limited by the size of Earth, which will sharpen our images. I think we’re entering an era of precision imaging of black holes. Why is that so important? There are no deeper questions in the universe than how black holes work. That is because we know that, at their heart, they contain a mystery – of how gravity and quantum mechanics work together. This is the deepest question there is right now. How do you feel about the prize? I know the whole team feels this sense of accomplishment. To have our peers recognise our work, to have a prize like the Breakthrough Prize recognise it, means that it’s not just that we think we did something important – the whole world feels it. I couldn’t be more proud of the team. I just couldn’t be more proud. ❚