Title: Taking pictures and making movies of supermassive black holes.

Speaker: Sheperd Doeleman (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian)

Special Time: 10:00, Thursday, 29 October 2026

Tencent Meeting: 953-393-101

Location: Lecture Hall, 3rd floor

Invited by: Zhiqiang Shen

Abstract：

The next-generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) project will enhance the global EHT array so that it is possible to make real-time and time-lapse movies of supermassive black holes. It will do this by constructing radio dishes in new geographical locations, increasing the bandwidth of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) instrumentation, expanding the frequency coverage to three observing bands, and enabling flexible scheduling and long-duration observing campaigns. These improvements will transform the EHT, allowing precision measurement of black hole spin, provide access to many more black holes for demographic studies, reveal the fundamental processes for relativistic jet launch, and further observations of strong gravitational lensing predictions. The talk will cover the science, instrumental development and status of the ngEHT.

CV：

Shep Doeleman is Founding Director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project and led the international team that made the first image of a black hole.  He received his bachelor's from Reed College, a PhD in astrophysics from MIT, and spent a year in Antarctica conducting space-science experiments where he got hooked on doing research in challenging circumstances.  After serving as assistant director of MIT’s Haystack Observatory and receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012, he moved to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and co-founded the Black Hole Initiative – the first center dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of black holes. He is the recipient of the Lancelot M. Berkeley Prize and the Bruno Rossi Prize from the American Astronomical Society, the Prix Georges Lemaître, and he now leads the next-generation EHT (ngEHT) project with a goal to make movies of black holes.