First, the new news It’s the start of a new year so of course I made a bunch of resolutions that likely won’t stick, but one of them was to start doing more research blogging on our site, and to encourage my group to do better here too, after a longish hiatus. Why the hiatus? At least from my side I guess the fallout from the pandemic has been a slow burn that just drags on. While in 2020-2021 we were in total crisis mode at the university, in terms of switching courses to online, trying to support students and colleagues and just generally trying to keep up morale, by…
Read More >>One ring to bind them all…one black hole, many views of its powerful jet!
It’s an exciting week in black hole-ville, as we are on the sky again with an even bigger and better Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) array, for the first time since 2018! At the same time, we are still only publishing results from our first major campaign in 2017. Why? Because our 2017 campaign was the first time anyone ever tried to use an Earth-sized telescope to make an image of a black hole, and that is technically extremely challenging. Each new result requires an enormous amount of work to develop, as well as significant vetting so we have confidence in what we publish. But as of this year, the results…
Read More >>NWO Domain Science Diversity Initiative Award
I am somewhere between embarrassed and excited that I’ve just been named the winner of the first ever NWO (Dutch Research Council, our national funding agency) Domain Science Diversity Initiative Award! It’s on Twitter and YouTube and everything! In the somewhat awkward video, I express a bit of reluctance around having the money be attached to me rather than the project, that I wanted to explain a bit more here in this post. But first a bit about the project: I started Altair using funding from my NWO VICI career grant, together with science communication expert Alex Verkade (now head of the VSC network of museums). After the first year…
Read More >>EHT in the Bloomberg 50!
We were very excited to find out that Bloomberg Businessweek named EHT to the 2019 Bloomberg 50, its annual list of innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders who have changed the global business landscape in measurable ways over the past year. The list will be published in a special issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, on newsstands on Friday, Dec. 6, 2019. An unranked list, the Bloomberg 50 represents the most influential thought leaders in business, entertainment, finance, politics, and science and technology whose 2019 accomplishments were particularly noteworthy. Six of us from the collaboration, covering the range of international representatives, leadership and scientific contributions, have been invited to NYC on Monday 9 December…
Read More >>Drumroll please….
And now finally the moment you’ve all been waiting for! The Event Horizon Telescope Consortium made the big announcement at midnight last night that there will be press events around the world, on 10 April, at 13:00UT (which for normal people means 9:00am US East coast time, or 15:00 Central European time), where we will announce a “groundbreaking result”! I am honored (and, quite frankly, terrified) to be one of the four panelists speaking at the US event, hosted by the National Science Foundation at the National Press Club in Washington D.C.., representing the European and Multi-wavelength facility partners. Basically, after the NSF director Dr. France Cordova speaks, each of…
Read More >>Quick promo for EHT-related article in the Guardian
I should have posted about this awhile ago when this came out, but things have been very hectic recently. The Guardian did a nice little blurb about the Event Horizon Telescope, and spoke to me and Prof. Peter Galison (who is also participating in our upcoming panel at SXSW! See https://schedule.sxsw.com/2019/events/PP83510) about the leadup to releasing our first results in the coming months. See here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jan/11/scientists-close-to-capturing-first-image-of-black-hole-at-the-centre-of-the-milky-way. Thanks to the author, science correspondent Hannah Devlin, for the nice coverage. It’s exciting to see my name in print in the Guardian since it’s one of my favorite newspapers!
Read More >>Announcing: the Advancing Theoretical Astrophysics international summer school!
I am very excited to announce our Advancing Theoretical Astrophysics summer school in Amsterdam, 15-26 July! See below for more info, but this school will be really unique in that we have top international experts in theoretical/computational astrophysics and advanced techniques like statistics and machine learning, coming together to teach ~50 students with an emphasis on increasing participation in the wonderful world of theory from URM students and students from countries with less access to resources. We will adapt principles of collective learning, and the atmosphere will be very supportive, so if you or anyone you know have been thinking about moving into astro theory but too afraid to try,…
Read More >>Being open about overwork in academia
(warning, very long post!!) I hope those of you reading our blog enjoy hearing all about the great research we are doing, led by amazing young researchers! This post is a bit different, but equally important, about the toll that academic life can have if we’re not careful about self-care. Overwork is something I still struggle with, and because it is such a common theme I thought I would post about something that happened to me this past week. As you can maybe glean from Tobi’s blog about our group retreat last month, I try to be open with my group about the trials and travails of academia, including my…
Read More >>Event Horizon Telescope Panel accepted for SXSW 2019!!
Awhile back I posted about our pitch to give a panel session at the SXSW Interactive Festival in 2019, in the “Intelligent Future” track. I am very pleased to announce that our panel was selected last week, and is now online as part of the official schedule!! We do not know what day yet, but I’m extremely excited about this opportunity. SXSW is a unique gathering of high-tech gurus and entertainment ‘influencers’ with artists, educators and musicians. We aim to get a very broad group of people interested in the truly amazing scientific capabilities we now have, like using the entire Earth as a single telescope to “photograph” a black…
Read More >>Event Horizon Telescope SXSW 2019 Panel Pitch
We are busy analyzing the data from the first full run of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2017, which I’ve posted about before but is a telescope effectively the size of the Earth, aimed at making the first ever actual picture of a supermassive black hole! While everything is understandably still under embargo it’s fair to say that we are very excited about the new results, which we anticipate announcing at the end of this year, or early in 2019. As part of that, we have been seeking new venues to reach the public, beyond standard scientific meetings, and so this year we decided to submit a pitch for…
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