Photographing a black hole used to be science fiction. But in April 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope made it reality - and Ziri Younsi was part of the team behind the breakthrough.
Watch the Q&A with Ziri here: https://youtu.be/AwBRPrOBVTY
See our playlist of talks about black holes here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbnrZHfNEDZx9TYta68iHw8XiH35kmxYR
What are black holes? How are they created? Was the black hole in Interstellar accurate? And why did it take over a century between the discovery of black holes and confirmation of their existence?
In this talk Ziri explores how we are now able to capture images of black holes using the Event Horizon Telescope, what we can learn from these images, and how these and future explorations will help advance our understanding of the origins of space, time, and the Universe itself.
This talk was filmed at the Royal Institution on 25 February 2023. We believe that science is for everyone - visit our website to find out more: https://www.rigb.org
Ziri Younsi is a UKRI Stephen Hawking Fellow at UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory. After graduating from the University of Cambridge and subsequently UCL, Ziri began working within the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2014, first as a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Frankfurt and later as a Leverhulme Trust Fellow at UCL.
His research program develops and performs supercomputer calculations of black holes, underpinning the EHT's interpretation of black hole images. He is a co-recipient of the 2020 Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics and the Royal Astronomical Society's 2021 Group Achievement Award. In 2022 Ziri was elected to the EHT's Science Council, and is co-lead of the EHT's Gravitational Physics working group. Watch Ziri's Youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/ZiriYounsi
00:00:00 Intro to the project and team
00:06:02 A brief history of black holes
00:15:18 The first ever photograph of a black hole
00:19:05 What is a black hole?
00:28:49 What does a black hole look like?
00:33:20 How accurate was the black hole in Interstellar?
00:34:10 Understanding black hole images
00:40:43 The imaging process
01:01:00 What have we learnt so far?
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