SIGGRAPH Frontiers: Imaging a Black Hole with The Event Horizon Telescope

It is theorized that a black hole will leave a "shadow" on a background of hot gas. Unfortunately, due to its small size, traditional imaging approaches require an Earth-sized radio telescope.

In this talk, Katie Bouman (Caltech) discuss techniques that her team have developed to photograph a black hole using the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of telescopes scattered across the globe. Imaging a black hole’s structure with this computational telescope required them to reconstruct images from sparse measurements, heavily corrupted by atmospheric error.