News & Multimedia
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UvA Press Release
€4.9M from NWA-ORC awarded to study, and educate the public, about black holes!
The Dutch Black Hole Consortium (DBHC), which includes several UvA researchers, has been awarded a grant of € 4.9 million by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) as part of the National Science Agenda. This new interdisciplinary consortium aims to further unravel the mysteries surrounding black holes and the wider universe.
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Talk That Science
Podcast about black holes for non-experts, with music!
This podcast series has just been started by students at my university. This was a meandering chat about black holes and other stuff, including music, designed for non-experts. Here is there description: "You have probably heard of black holes. They are known as all-destructive holes that sluck up everything that comes near it. Some say they might be used as time machines! But what about this is science, and what is fiction? In this episode, Sera Markoff shares insights about how she made the first picture of a black hole, time in black holes and the importance of science for society."
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Atlassian
New Atlassian Teamistry podcast about the teamwork behind the EHT black hole image
Almost a year ago, the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration revealed the first ever picture of a black hole. This half hour podcast featuring EHT collaboration members Shep Doeleman, Avery Broderick and Sera Markoff, focuses on the backstory and teamwork involved to make this project a success.
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AAS Press Release
TOP HIGH-ENERGY PRIZE AWARDED TO EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE PROJECT The top prize in high-energy astrophysics has been awarded to Dr. Sheperd Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the Event Horizon Telescope team for the landmark image and analysis of the first shadow of a black hole. The High Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) of the American Astronomical Society awards the Rossi Prize in recognition of significant contributions as well as recent and original work in high-energy astrophysics. The Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, is a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes that was designed to capture images of black holes. In April 2019, the EHT collaboration announced that it had successfully taken the first picture of the black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, with the results published in a series of six papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image, a bright ring formed by light bending around the black hole, quickly circled the globe, appearing across the front pages of newspapers and throughout social media. The 2020 Rossi Prize recognizes this historic scientific achievement. "After nearly two decades of planning and work, it was exhilarating to see the EHT images so clearly confirm a fundamental prediction of Einstein’s theory of gravity,” said Doeleman. “We can now visualize and study supermassive black holes all the way down to their event horizons. It’s a remarkable breakthrough made possible by a global collaboration of researchers and the support of many funding agencies and foundations." The prize is in honor of Professor Bruno Rossi, an authority on cosmic ray physics and a pioneer in the field of X-ray astronomy. The Rossi Prize includes an engraved certificate and a $1,500 award. Dr. Doeleman will give a lecture at the 237th AAS meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, in January 2021.
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EHT included in 2019 Bloomberg 50 list!
Albert Einstein was right again. More than 100 years ago, his calculations suggested that when too much energy or matter is concentrated in one place, it will collapse in on itself and turn into a dark vortex of nothingness. Physicists found evidence to support Einstein’s black hole concept, but they’d never observed one directly. In 2017, 200-plus scientists affiliated with more than 60 institutions set out to change that, using eight global radio observatories to chart the sky for 10 days. In April they released their findings, which included an image of a dark circle surrounded by a fiery doughnut (the galaxy Messier 87), 55 million light years away and 6.5 billion times more massive than our sun. “We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said Shep Doeleman, leader of what came to be known as the Event Horizon Telescope team. The team’s name refers to the edge of a black hole, the point beyond which light and matter cannot escape. In some ways, the first picture of a black hole is also the first picture of nothing.
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UvA Press Release
EHT wins prestigious Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics!
The annual Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, for a total amount of $3 million, goes to the 347 scientists that co-authored the six papers published by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration in April 2019. The papers announced the first image of a supermassive black hole, taken by means of an Earth-sized alliance of telescopes. Among the laureates are UvA scientists Sera Markoff, Oliver Porth and Koushik Chatterjee. UvA postdoc Doosoo Yoon also contributed to the EHT results.
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University of Amsterdam
Honorary awards for astronomers Selma de Mink and Sera Markoff
Prof. Dr Sera Markoff receives the Willem de Graaff Prize for her inspired, enthusiastic and versatile public outreach activities. Markoff is a professor of theoretical high-energy astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam. She regularly goes to schools in disadvantaged areas with a team of young researchers to introduce young children to science in general and astronomy in particular. Last week she organized another stargazing evening combined with an iftar celebration during Ramadan. Markoff is also a scientific heavyweight; for example, she was recently involved in taking the very first photograph of a black hole.
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Physics Today
Commentary: The problematic media portrayals of women in science
All the hype around Bouman—including the misrepresentations of her and her contributions—stemmed from her photos going viral and then being picked up by media. Although people sharing things on social media may not be attuned to such nuances, those who cover scientific discoveries should take care to include women without focusing on their appearance. And it can be done: Take, for example, the New York Times and Wired. When covering the discovery, they interviewed two other women from the black hole team, Sera Markoff from the University of Amsterdam and Feryal Özel from the University of Arizona, respectively. The women served as scientific experts who explained the work and its implications, and neither woman’s appearance ever came up.
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Space Cowboys podcast
Space Cowboys (BNR Radio) podcast
Sera Markoff sits on the Science Council of the Event Horizon Telescope, which made world news recently by taking a picture of a black hole. She is also professor of Theoretical High Energy Astrophysics at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy and GRAPPA at the University of Amsterdam. She features on this week's version of Space Cowboys, a weekly podcast on space, rocket science, the hunt for life, telecommunications and maybe even some espionage. Space Cowboys is brought to you in English by Thys Roes (https://yeah-science.net/) and Herbert Blankesteijn (https://blankesteijn.com/) in collaboration with BNR in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
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Folia
Profile (in Dutch) in UvA Folia magazine
Sera Markoff, UvA-hoogleraar theoretische hoge-energie astrofysica, wist al sinds vorige zomer dat er een foto was gemaakt van een zwart gat. Ze sprak erover tijdens de persconferentie in Washington. ‘Ik was bang dat ik voor de ogen van miljoenen mensen een fout zou maken, zou struikelen of mijn verhaal zou vergeten.’
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NRC.NL
Zwart gat gooit heet gas alle kanten op
Markoff: „Als de beide rotatie-assen niet samenvallen, ontstaat er een krachtmeting tussen het zwarte gat en de (magnetische) krachten die de schijf bijeenhouden. Als gevolg hiervan trekt het binnenste deel van de schijf krom en vertoont het een schommelbeweging. En de jets schommelen mee.”
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New York Times
Darkness Visible, Finally: Astronomers Capture First Ever Image of a Black Hole
The images released today bolster the notion of violence perpetrated over cosmic scales, said Sera Markoff, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, and a member of the Event Horizon team. “Black holes must be the most exotic major disrupters of cosmic order,” she said.