Imaging Black Holes

Black holes are spectacular manifestations of Einstein's General Relativity. Many supermassive black holes launch narrow jets that transport energy to enormous distances at nearly the speed of light. Such jets shape the evolution of entire galaxies, but the source of the jet’s power – either the energy of in-falling gas, or magnetic fields extracting the black hole’s own energy - remains unknown. I am a leading expert on using data from the Event Horizon Telescope to provide the first resolved images of black holes. In the next five years, sensitive data will begin to probe the connection between black holes and jets, but we still lack crucial analysis tools, models, and simulations necessary to understand these observations. With support from a Villum Young Investigator grant, I will build an interdisciplinary team at the Niels Bohr Institute to produce and interpret the next generation of black hole images to determine what powers extragalactic jets throughout the Universe.