sold out / 5:30 doors / 5:45 lecture / seated

Join us and grab a drink as we crash a black hole's photo shoot and reveal how we built an Earth-sized camera to capture it...

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TOPIC: How to Photograph a Black Hole

SPEAKER: Dr. Sheperd Doeleman (Center of Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian)

For more than a century, black holes existed only in theory. Scientists knew they were there from indirect evidence - stars orbiting an invisible mass, bursts of X-rays, and, more recently, gravitational waves, but no one had ever seen one. After all, how do you photograph something that doesn't even let light escape?

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration changed that by capturing the first-ever image of a black hole. Achieving this required treating the challenge as a planet-scale engineering problem. By linking radio telescopes across the globe and synchronizing them with atomic clocks, an international team created a virtual telescope the size of Earth, giving it the resolving power needed to image one of the smallest, darkest, and most distant objects in the universe.

In this talk, Dr. Sheperd Doeleman shares the story behind one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 21st century, revealing how breakthroughs in astrophysics, engineering, and international collaboration made the impossible possible.