General Meeting – September 2019

6:30 pm – Introductory Presentation

Title:  Two Talks: Dark Sky NM Observatory and Bylaw Changes

Speaker 1: TAAA member Gregg Ruppel will talk about his Dark Sky New Mexico Observatory near Animas, NM.

Speaker 2: TAAA member Doug Smith will provide information about two suggested TAAA Bylaws changes.

7:30 pm – Main Presentation

Title:  Testing Einstein’s Gravity by Taking Photographs of Black Holes

Speaker:  Pierre Christian is a postdoc at the University of Arizona, where he is the Steward Prize Fellow in theoretical and computational astrophysics. Previously, he earned his doctorate from Harvard University, where he worked on black hole astrophysics. At UA, he is interested in using black holes to study gravitational physics. He is a member of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, a worldwide scientific effort to take resolved images of black holes.

Pierre will describe the recent effort of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration in taking a high-resolution image of the black hole at the center of supergiant galaxy M87. He will first explain what a black hole is according to Einstein’s gravitational theory of general relativity. Then he will describe how a worldwide array of radio telescopes was used to capture an image of a black hole, and how such experiments can be used to test our understanding of gravity.