Shep Doeleman on hunting for black holes

Shep Doeleman is a senior research fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and one of the world’s leading experts on black holes. He heads the globe-spanning Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, which in recent years unveiled humanity’s first-ever images of black holes – including the supermassive behemoth at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. Doeleman takes Lauren and Colin behind the scenes of the EHT’s discoveries, which earned the collaboration the prestigious Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2020. He also looks ahead to the next big milestones in black hole science, such as the Next-Generation EHT (ngEHT) and the Event Horizon Explorer, which will bring these mysterious phenomena into even sharper focus. View the episode transcript here.

Conversations at the Perimeter is co-hosted by Perimeter Teaching Faculty member Lauren Hayward and journalist-turned-science communicator Colin Hunter. In each episode, they chat with a guest scientist about their research, the challenges they encounter, and the drive that keeps them searching for answers.

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