Black Holes: Seeing the Unseeable

This is the inaugural Charles W. Misner Endowed Lectureship in Gravitational Physics. The speaker will be Sam Gralla, Associate Professor of Physics, University of Arizona,

Black holes emit no light of their own and absorb everything that crosses their event horizon. But they are not invisible, and thanks to some spectacular breakthroughs of recent years, now we can see them. I will tell the remarkable story of black hole imaging and explain the science in simple terms: What are we looking at in a black hole image, and what do we learn from it? I will also describe the exciting future of this new field, with new telescopes and space missions set to probe black holes in finer detail than ever before, putting our understanding of gravity to the ultimate test.