ONLINE – General Meeting – April 2022

The Main Presentation will start at 6:30 P.M, followed by Mary Turner’s popular Seasonal Night Sky Presentation. Both are open to the public via https://www.facebook.com/TucsonAstronomy/.  

TITLE:  Resolving Black Holes with the Event Horizon Telescope 

PRESENTATION:  Black holes, predicted almost a century ago by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, were believed to power some of the most energetic phenomena in the Universe. However, their compact sizes make them extremely difficult to resolve. In 2017, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration brought together many radio telescopes around the world to form an Earth-size virtual telescope, and successfully captured the first ever images of a black hole—in the center of galaxy M87. This result enables astrophysicist to study the detailed astrophysics around black holes and test General Relativity itself. In this talk, presenter Chi-wan Chan will cover the theoretical background of black holes, the observation technique used to resolve them, and some of the open questions in black hole astrophysics.

BIO:  Chi-kwan “CK” Chan is a computational astrophysicist working with cutting edge technologies to advance both theoretical and observational research. He has developed new algorithms to study magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, used graphics processing units (GPUs) to accelerate general relativistic ray tracing, designed cloud computing infrastructures to handle big observational data, and applied machine learning algorithms to speed up and automate data processing. Some of his active projects include simulating and understanding accretion disks, capturing images of black holes, and visualizing astrophysical simulations in virtual reality. He’s also a true wildcat, having received his bachelors and doctoral degrees from the University of Arizona. He is a Data Science Fellow at the UA Data Science Institute and an affiliate member of UA’s Applied Math GIDP.