Heino Falcke
Heino Falcke
Title: “Towards the Ends of Space and Time – the First Image of a Black hole”
Abstract: Black holes mark the most exotic objects within the theory of general relativity. Their interior is shielded from observation by an event horizon, a virtual one-way membrane through which matter, light and information can enter but never leave. For a long time, the immediate surroundings of black holes remained elusive and even their existence was doubted. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first-ever image of a black hole, observing its dark shadow in the radio galaxy M87. In 2022, the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way was imaged. This confirmed the presence of supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies and provided strong evidence for the presence of an event horizon. The talk will describe the road towards making these images and discuss future directions.
Bio: Heino Falcke is a theoretical astrophysicist and radio astronomer who made fundamental contributions to the understanding of black holes and cosmic particles. He developed a unified model to explain the broad-band emission and the jet-disk coupling of the vast majority of black holes and discovered the ‘fundamental plane relation’, connecting and unifying super massive and stellar mass black holes. He pioneered the idea of imaging the ‘shadow of a black hole’ with global millimetre-wave interferometry. Falcke co-founded the Event Horizon Telescope and contributed to it with his group and as chair of its science council, and is currently a member of the board. This led to the publication of the first-ever image of a black hole in April 2019 and the publication of the first-ever image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. He also co-developed the LOFAR telescope and pioneered the detection of cosmic rays with radio antennas. The technique provides precision measurements of the cosmic ray composition and allows studying their origin. The method was successfully implemented in the LOFAR telescope and is now integrated into the large Pierre Auger Observatory. Falcke is also PI of a low-frequency radio experiment (NCLE) on board the Queqiao satellite behind the moon – the first pathfinder experiment launched to probe the dark ages of the early universe.
Affiliation: Professor of Astroparticle Physics and Radio Astronomy, Radboud University Nijmegen
