Events at Physics |
Events on Thursday, September 24th, 2026
- R. G. Herb Condensed Matter Seminar
- Title to be announced
- Time: 10:00 am - 11:00 am
- Place: Chamberlin 5310
- Speaker: Frank Gao, UW-Madison Chemistry
- Host: Elio Koenig-Tarasevich
- Astronomy Colloquium
- Black Hole Images: What they've taught us so far and how we can improve them
- Time: 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
- Place: 4421 Sterling Hall
- Speaker: Lia Medeiros, UW-Milwaukee
- Abstract: Horizon-scale observations of accreting supermassive black holes with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have opened a new window onto strong-field gravity and black-hole accretion. The EHT's 2022 observations of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the black hole at the center of our Galaxy, provide a new opportunity to test the Kerr metric in a previously unexplored regime. I will discuss the EHT observations of Sgr A*, focusing on what they can reveal about fundamental physics, and briefly compare these results with the earlier observations of M87*. I will then discuss how improvements in both observations and data analysis can extend these measurements in the near future. In particular, I will introduce PRIMO, a machine-learning algorithm for EHT data analysis that uses a large library of high-fidelity simulations as a training set. I will show a higher-resolution reconstruction of M87* obtained with PRIMO and demonstrate how improved image reconstruction can provide new constraints on both black-hole accretion and strong-field gravity.
- Host: Nicholas Stone
