![]() ![]() ![]() Hawking’s finding that black holes could have temperatures and let heat slip away implied that they were not as cut off from the universe as we had thought. Originally suggested by Jacob Bekenstein but fleshed out and concretized by Hawking in a paper of 1975, the notion that quantum effects brought on by the immense gravity of black holes could actually allow some heat to escape was a game-changer in the field.īlack holes had long been supposed to be perfect consumers: the consensus view was that what happens in a black hole stays in a black hole. “When things get hard,” Doeleman says, “I think of somebody like Stephen Hawking and I think, keep going.” In 2016, Hawkings gave the inaugural lecture for the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard.Īs Doeleman notes, Hawking is perhaps best known for establishing mathematically the existence of radiation leakage in black holes-now termed “Hawking radiation” in his honor. So, in that sense, they become quite different objects.”Īt the same time, the macroscopic example of Hawking, a man who managed to assemble seminal theories on black hole dynamics from the confines of his electric wheelchair, is a source of profound inspiration for the EHT team. And he rsolidified the mathematics and the thinking behind the fact that they appear to be able to evaporate and radiate all the energy that they have swallowed. “Until then, they’d been these drains of the universe that were a one-way door. “He really showed some of the seminal results that led to our understanding that black holes can emit radiation,” Doeleman says. On the one hand, Hawking’s technical findings remind EHT scientists that, whatever their preconceptions of what this black hole will look like, they have to be ready for anything. They wind up being some of the brightest things in the sky.”ĮHT director Sheperd Doeleman says Stephen Hawking played a dual role in shaping the project. “But in fact, there’s so much gas and dust trying to get into it that, through friction and heating, the gas around the black hole shines with a temperature of hundreds of billions of degrees. “You would think that a black hole, which swallows light, wouldn’t be visible,” says EHT director Sheperd Doeleman. But black holes are a lot less dark and lifeless than most people would expect. The ongoing mission, which involves a large network of telescopes whose observations will be composited, spans dozens of academic institutions across the globe.Īt a distance of 26 light years, it may seem a wonder that we can detect such an object at all. ![]() Its target, some four million times the mass of our Sun, sits at the very heart of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The mission of the EHT is deceptively simple: create the first-ever image of a real black hole. In the wake of his death, scores of Hawking’s longtime collaborators stepped back from the daily whir of research to reflect on the impacts he had made on their lives.Īmong his many collaborations, Hawking had an outsized influence on an unprecedented global astronomy project called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), whose development was led in part by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He expanded the collective imagination of humanity in a way few others have managed, helping scientists and non-scientists alike to better grasp the workings of the universe. Yet while black holes are known for destroying and compressing everything that has the misfortune to fall within their range, Hawking was always astonishingly creative. Where black holes collect light, Hawking collected luminaries-his circle of intellectual friends and acquaintances was as energetic and bright as they come, including Illinois-born physicist and screenwriter Leonard Mlodinow, Caltech Nobelist Kip Thorne, and British Astronomer Royal Martin Reese. ![]() Like a black hole, Hawking was a massive presence who drew all around him into his personal orbit. In many ways, the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking resembled the very phenomena he spent so much of his life conceptualizing: black holes. ![]()
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