Physics Colloquium

Date
Tue, Sep 5, 2017 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Weekly on Tuesday for 12 times
Location
Physical Sciences Complex Lobby

Description

Jon McKinney, University of Maryland

Probing General Relativity with the Event Horizon Telescope

The first resolved images of the strong-gravity region of a black hole will soon be produced by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). I will discuss the significant instrumental, observational, and theoretical efforts of the EHT collaboration that have come together in order to probe the strong-field gravity regime of the black hole in the center of our Galaxy in SgrA* and in the galaxy M87. I will highlight the challenges of interpreting past and future observations, which require state-of-the-art computational physics simulations of the plasma, black hole, and the polarized radiation. Such simulation models reveal a wealth of information that can be used to probe (and potentially test) Einstein's general relativity in the strong-field regime.