 Black holes are these incredibly fascinating but mysterious objects. We know they sit at the hearts of galaxies and they drive how those galaxies grow and how those galaxies die. They swallow gas and stars up. There are also these incredibly enigmatic and mysterious objects that live at the boundary between our two great theories of physics, general relativity, which describes gravity, and quantum mechanics, which describes the smallest things in the world. We want to make an image of a black hole in order to get the best proof yet of the existence of black holes. What we want to see is a ring of light that surrounds the black hole and shows that all of the mass of the black hole is packed into that very dense space. The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration is this amazing group of fantastic people from all around the world, Americans, Europeans, people from Asia who've come together with all their technical expertise and scientific expertise to make this image of a ring around the black hole. We've been a formal collaboration for only a few years, but this is the culmination of several decades of work that people have been doing. I've been involved in this for the past 25 years since I was a student trying to make an image of a black hole and now we're finally doing it. Our experiments are like an Arctic expedition. We have to plan for months and months and months in advance, gather our equipment, and then we have this great migration of people to observatories all around the world. We stay up all night, we run our telescopes, and then we have this terrible period of waiting where we don't know if it's all worked. We send all of our data together, and only when it's truly combined do we know if it's worked. And then the even harder part begins of analyzing that data and being very, very careful doing all the checks and balances to know that we got it right. The most challenging part of this is pulling it all together and doing as sophisticated a test as we can to ensure the reliability of what we're doing. We're pulling together data from all these stations, giant volumes of data, combining it together, and we want to make sure that we get everything absolutely right because the result is just so important. The most exciting thing by far has been our first view of the image. I didn't think we would get it. I thought it was just going to be too hard. I knew it was worth it to try, but I didn't think we would get it. And seeing that image for the first time was really eye-opening for me. Something that I've wanted to see for over two decades now. That was it. The future of this project is amazing because now that we've seen what we're after, we have so many more questions to ask about it, to push into the regime of can we decide is Einstein right? Can we study how gas really gets swallowed by the black hole? Can we see a giant eruption of radiation, of particles coming out of the system? So many things to do. We've really only just begun. The black holes are the most fascinating and most attractive objects in the universe. They are extreme objects. So they are so densely packed that nothing can escape. Gravity plays such an important role that everything is locked inside the black hole and nothing can escape. So we don't get any information from within this very compact object. So this is a very peculiar kind of object in the universe and we would like to understand it. We think there are black holes in the universe. There is a lot of indirect evidence that they should exist, but we are not sure what kind of physics rules these black holes inside. So what's the physical nature of these black holes is. And that's the reason we do these kind of observations and we try to figure out what's going on. The Event Horizon Telescope Corporation is a big international project with many scientists from all over this planet who are working on the one girl to get an image of the immediate environment surrounding of a black hole. So the black hole you can imagine as a kind of sphere with an Event Horizon and the Event Horizon is the outer boundary of the black hole. This is an area which has never been imaged before. So we want to get an image of the immediate surrounding of the Event Horizon. We all have different roles in this collaboration. There's a lot of expertise coming together from all the different scientists. So we hope we can combine successfully our knowledge to understand what's going on in the surrounding of an Event Horizon. I'm coming from the imaging part so I work on data, on imaging very long baseline interferometry data. So we zoom into the environment of black holes but not that far so far. So we couldn't go that far as we hoped to be able to do now but we were imaging the outer parts the jets for example of black holes. We are still working on the A.H.T. data and it's amazing to be able to work on data which have never been obtained before. To have highest resolution observations this is a unique time for scientists in his or her life to work on this kind of data so to work to see into an area where we didn't have any information before. We hope to be successful and really get an image of the immediate vicinity of an Event Horizon. I mean this will open up so many possibilities to discuss what kind of physics is going on there and the most exciting thing about this project is the hope that we will be successful that we really get an image of the immediate vicinity of an Event Horizon. So that would be unique, that would be great and we would be able to study physics that we couldn't do before. The future of the project will hopefully go towards a new understanding of more fundamental questions in physics. If this is true that black holes are the extreme objects where we can study gravity and we know that general relativity which describes black holes in the outer part up to the Event Horizon breaks down at the Event Horizon so the big hope is that with more data we might be able to study the physics beyond general relativity so maybe there might be quantum physics ruling beyond the Event Horizon or the combination of quantum physics and general relativity which would be the theory of quantum gravity which is non-existent at the moment but we might learn more about this with the help of studying black holes. Black holes are literally gravity run amok. They are purely gravitational objects predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity and their most notable and terrifying feature is that things go in and they never come back out. Black holes are places where Einstein's theory of general relativity is the whole story not merely a perturbation on top of Newton's theory which explains the dynamics of planets in our solar system. As a result, black holes provide a unique environment in which to probe general relativity specifically and strong gravity generally and its implications across the cosmos. So the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration is a collection of experts across the world who are coming together to create a unique capability the highest resolution imaging instrument in the history of astronomy for the single purpose of capturing the image of a shadow of a black hole. So I come in close to the end which I think is a privileged place to be where after many other people before me have put in the hard work of collecting data and calibrating the data, we interpret the data. We try to determine what exactly does this image, the shape of the shadow, the shape of the emission about the shadow tell us about the fundamental physics of gravity and about how black holes grow and launch outflows which impact the universe around them. So we've been doing this for 15 years now and at the beginning it was simply extraordinary that some points in the indeterminate future these might actually be relevant. I have to say it's taken on a new importance now as we actually have images that look like the simulations. So it's an extraordinary confluence between theory and experiment and it promises tremendous breakthroughs on the horizon. The most difficult part and the most exciting parts of scientific projects are in the same. Accessing the information inherent in the EHT images of M87 and ultimately SAJ-STAR is exactly both the challenge and the great payoff. The EHT is a transformative experiment that's going to create a sea change in how we understand the life and times of black holes, both how they grow and how they impact the universe around them but also their fundamental gravity. I think the future of the EHT in particular is going to be written both in detailed modeling and understanding detailed fluctuations in the image but also moving from black hole portraiture to black hole cinema when we take not one image but hundreds and we compare how they evolve over time. A black hole is the most mysterious object in the universe. It's when matter gets to be in such a small space that it's so dense that the force of gravity prevents even light from escaping. That's a one-way door from our universe and if we can study that we can answer some of the most fundamental questions that people can ask. If you want to make a test of the fundamental theories of the universe you want to go to the most extreme laboratories in the universe and a black hole is that. The Event Horizon Telescope is our chance as humans to take the first picture of a black hole. The most difficult part of the Event Horizon Telescope for me has been building the whole team bringing everyone together. When we first started this work we were just a handful of people making measurements of the size of these black holes and since then we've grown from a few people to over 200 and now we're ready to make the first image of a black hole and that has been a big period of growth. Just by measuring the size of black holes with a few telescopes and I remember seeing those first results come across my computer screen and that was when I got hooked. That was when I knew that something really extraordinary was possible. As the director I do many things. I go to telescopes and I do observations but I also enjoy the analysis and I also enjoy the imaging. So I do many many things. I wear many hats in the collaboration. The future of this project is amazing. We have done something extraordinary. We've made the first picture of a black hole but now we want to do even more. Now we want to make the first movie. Now we want to understand how space-time rotates around the black hole. We'll do that by putting more telescopes around the world to make our virtual lens even better. One of the most uplifting things for me is the team that we've built and the fact that we're doing something that people have told us was impossible. And when you at the end of the day do something that people tell you you can't do it's an incredible feeling and I think the whole team is very very proud that we've accomplished something like this. It's not just for us, it's for everyone. Black hole is a huge amount of math in a small area which distorts space and time such that everything that goes too close light and every information disappears forever in that hole. It never gets out. And even time slows down and comes to a standstill at the edge of a black hole. That's one of the weirdest and most exotic objects we can imagine. We have never seen a black hole. So far black holes is a theory. We've seen how it actually seems to do things. We've seen black holes merge. We've heard the gravitational waves from the merging of what we think are black holes but we've never seen a black hole. We've never seen the actual object. Seeing a black hole actually allows us to not only know they exist and not only know an event horizon exists it also allows us to test some of the very basic predictions of the theory of general relativity of Albert Einstein which really describes space and time in its completeness and that has never been tested before. The event horizon telescope collaboration is a collaboration of scientists around the world from many different countries, continents and institutions to make a telescope the size of the Earth giving us the highest resolution there is that currently is achievable with telescopes of any kind. I'm chairing the science council of the scientists giving advice of the scientific direction of the project and I'm leading a group in IMAGN to actually help with all the work from the instrumentation to the actual analysis of the data. One thing I really enjoy the most is when there's an observing campaign and we can actually go to the telescopes and I can go to the telescope myself and sit there and see and participate in when the data is being taken and it's like going to a monastery on the mountains for a week you just focus on one thing and that is really a very pleasant and an exciting experience. I remember the first moment when I saw the first image they had made the first image and we were actually looking at it interpreting it together and just that moment when you see that image for the first time and the data comes and the ground truth comes that's just awesome. The most difficult part of a collaboration is a collaboration is a people. There's so many different types of people with many different ways of thinking and working that together and making sure everybody gets credit, everybody gets heard and that's a very difficult thing if you don't have clear structures and we just have structures that are evolving we're a young collaboration so many things are still unclear or have to be settled and once you have everything set up then you can just do your work but now we have to do everything as we go develop the structure develop the way we work with each other and if you're on your own you know what you have to do but if you have 100 people telling everybody else what to do you have to deal with this I think we've been extremely lucky I'd expected that we have to work for years and years to many observations until we get a final image and then we look at our first source and we see that ring we see the event horizon and we see that shadow, that dark region and you know immediately the event horizon and a black hole from all sides at once in this thing, we see at a region where time stops this is a very different part of the universe that we're seeing for the very first time I think the most exciting result of our collaboration is that image that's something nobody has ever seen before of course you still need to understand what you're actually seeing you need to believe what you see because until you really convince yourself what we see there is physically really proof of an event horizon but that's part of an exciting journey I think we've just made the first step there's so many things still to do we need better images probably more telescopes and eventually we may have to go into space then we can make razor sharp images of black holes and test all the theories in great great detail I must have an incredibly sharp telescope to build the telescope so it's possible to see a Senfkorn in New York from Europe and that's what you do by turning the telescope all over the world and watching the highest radio frequencies and then you can see something like the shadows of a black hole and that's what we've done for the first time this is a global, worldwide collaboration of scientists but thanks to the European Union we were able to have funding that really brought us all the way forward and made the 2017 experiment and that was a very important breakthrough for us it took 20 years to have the idea then to develop the technology the first observations were made here in Europe by German scientists and then to bring the whole world together and then to bring so many data together and to be able to show that technology has only been there in recent years because of the digital development what you need is a telescope that can be seen in the United States and must be able to see that in New York from the Netherlands and to build this telescope you have to put a radio telescope all over the world that works at the highest radio frequencies that give us support with each other and then you can make a record the idea has already been formulated 20 years ago but you need all the telescopes you have to work internationally and you need digital electronics that upload a lot of data at the same time and that has just succeeded it is a worldwide collaboration where the Europeans have played an important role and thanks to the European Union we were able to not make such a big impact without the EU and in 2017 thanks to the European Union we actually succeeded so for this experiment it was clear that we need expertise from completely different areas and so we needed someone with imaging capabilities we needed someone with numerical relativity capabilities and in my case we needed someone who can try to find this additional information via pulsars and so just being part of this team means I mean first of all it's great to see all these young people being excited of being a big great team working together and then of course it's just there are some expectations around the world everyone sort of looks at us and wants to see that image and so do we and of course you're embedded in this global collaboration as well and so with us as this big team sort of representing the European team it's part of this global game we have colleagues around the world who have the same goal but it puts us on the landscape and really enables the project actually to be possible and so Europe and the ESC place this important role there the synergy grant means more than just adding money the synergy grant is not about having teams at three different places and then collaborate it's really as the word suggests synergy we really need to understand very deeply on a sort of almost day-to-day basis what the other people are doing in order to make progress in our own area so it's where things really come together and the synergy grant enables you to have this interaction in such an intensive way you wouldn't do this with the collaboration sort of bound by your day-to-day business and again you wouldn't look left, you wouldn't look right but with the synergy grant we have this great team you always know someone somewhere at the end of a computer line at the end of an email who knows exactly the answer to your question and so if you don't know the answer then we look work together to find it out and so it's that shared dream is this shared ambition which brings us together and therefore no one has actually ever seen a black hole and so we were able for the first time to actually take an image of a black hole and make it visible to everyone black holes are a prediction of theories of gravity that should absorb everything including light and that by definition makes it then difficult to make them visible to us and yet with that experiment where we look at the scent of the galaxies there we see the black hole as a shadow and so for the first time so if you try to look into the scent of galaxies it's usually blocked from view by dust and other stuff in the radio you can look through like here today we can look through rain you can look through clouds and so you can look through dust and with combining radio telescope like this together with other telescopes in the world you can peer right into the scent of the galaxy and see this black hole yes I mean there are some experiments like this which one person can dream of but will never be able to pull off by him or herself and so we come together to form this team and we got the resources from the European research council without it wouldn't have been impossible and so by putting the team together by putting the resources together and working worldwide with our collaborators this has become possible it's a really global endeavor at the heart of Europe Maybe everyone in the world has already heard of black holes but no one has ever seen a black hole and for the first time we were able to make a black hole visible as a visible image black holes are very simple objects but one could never verify that for the first time we are able to look at black holes on all sides and to see if the idea of how gravity works is correct when you look into the center of the galaxy you normally have dust in front of it and in the optical camera so you can't look into it so as you can see today we can look through dust rain, clouds and so we can connect it with telescopes all over the world a highly resolved image of the center of such a galaxy and thus make the black hole if you have such an idea you might be able to dream of it but you need a team you need the funding, you need the instruments and you need the right people and here we came together to get the EAC Council and that helped us to work globally with the people in the heart of Europe to lead the project it's an international collaboration of scientists both observers and theorists who have come together to answer this question of can we see black holes and what are black holes so I do two things in the collaboration I'm a member of the science council and we're basically the highest scientific advisory board for the collaboration and then I'm one of the conveners of the multi-wavelength working group and what that means is that we try to gather complementary information simultaneously with the EHT observations from radio to even gamma rays and hopefully even particles my role has been to gather this simultaneous data from other wavelengths but mostly I've been involved in trying to think about the modeling and making simulations and models of the light that could be coming out of a black hole I think for me personally this is something a lot of us have been working on for a long time so the day-to-day work wasn't the really exciting thing the really exciting thing for me was being able to finally test something that we've all been thinking about and working on at least for me personally 20-25 years I think the most difficult part is really the coordination of such a large group of people so many different facilities the fact that we had to request time on different facilities and get everything to come together on a strict timeline I think there's a really exciting future beyond the first time of imaging a black hole and the physics of black holes and what they do in the universe on how they excite particles and jets and affect their environments and so there's going to be a lot of work in the future we all understand from a mathematical point of view that black holes exist but to actually see something is a very visceral experience and I think important for science and also for us to believe in it I think it's important to image the black hole because it moves us beyond just these theoretical ideas and everything mathematically and we all believe these things exist but to actually see it is an extremely visceral experience and what we need to maybe believe that this theory is actually real why do we want to image a black hole because it's there because we can image it and because we want to see it and because imaging a black hole offers us a very unique way of testing one of the least understood fundamental forces which is the gravity The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration is a collaboration of more than 200 scientists with different backgrounds they all come from different parts of the world they have different experiences different set of skills these are engineers observers, theoreticians and they all work together not only to image the Event Horizon of a black hole but also to understand what we're seeing I'm a theoretician so I built numerical simulations simulation on a computer models of a black hole on a computer to understand the source but I also take parts in data analysis I also image the data myself I make images of black holes and I coordinate one of the working groups that has a very special focus on a very special part of these observations which is polarization data analysis imaging black holes and doing simulations is very exciting it's also very difficult and requires a lot of patience it's a very long process but seeing the final product is very satisfying the most exciting part of this project is making images of black holes and actually to see the unseen the long-term future of experiments like the Event Horizon Telescope is moving this kind of instrument into space and starting imaging black holes from space which improves a lot this kind of observation because it allows us to have even higher angular resolution than what we have now so we will be able maybe in 20 years 30 years make a very accurate images of the Event Horizon of a black hole if you like Einstein's theory of gravity then black holes are one of the most interesting examples of this theory and this is my role within this project I am a theorist I work with equations and simulations and my role is that to try and understand whether the image that we produce corresponds to the predictions of Einstein's theory or maybe to something else when the project was suggested to me I thought that this was a perfect match because I had skills that I could provide to this project and of course I was lacking those skills in terms of observations of radio astronomy or of pulsar observations but they were already present in these other collaborators so it was a fantastic way of combining talents from different people in a way that otherwise would have not been possible in order to take this picture you need the cooperation, the simultaneous observations of many radio telescopes across the planet you need to have the largest possible network of telescopes taking the same image at the same time not all of this slide actually goes into the black hole luckily and that's why we can produce an image and we have to compare the image that we simulate through computer programs with the image that we actually measure through observations so what is most surprising of this experience is that we managed to get a very good image the first time we tried to synchronize all of these telescopes at the same time it is not so surprising that we obtain the image that we had predicted through simulations because we believe our simulations are correct and because we believe that the theory of Einstein's general activity is the correct one we want you to take an image of a black hole and the problem with black holes is that they are very small so you want to take a very big black hole which unfortunately is very far away from us and so you need a big telescope this telescope is a hundred meter in diameter but it's not enough you want a bigger telescope and of course it's impossible to build but you can create a virtual telescope by joining different telescopes in different locations and so you can build a telescope which is as big as the earth and in fact that's exactly what we've done we joined a telescope like this with a telescope in the United States and one even in the south pole to get a very sharp image an image is comparable to seeing an orange on the moon black holes tell you that our regions inside them cannot be explored and for a physicist this is very disturbing and attractive at the same time because we don't like to have those which we cannot cross and in particular inside black holes physics is even expected to fail completely and so this even adds fascination to these objects so this type of science requires large funding inevitably because of the technology that is involved the manpower that is needed and this would not have been possible without the contribution of the European community that has allowed us, the European to play at the same level as our colleagues in Asia and in the United States a black hole that grows on it and becomes hot and lights up but not the whole light enters the black hole and reaches us observers and what we do is confront the images produced by numeric simulations with codes with the images observed what was surprising and that we were able to produce this image the first time that we coordinated all these telescopes to make this image it was the first time, there was no previous exercise and therefore having the image already very good, very sharp from the first attempt was a surprise the fact that then this image is in agreement with our predictions perhaps a little less a surprise as our predictions were extremely accurate and we believe that the instance is the correct theory to describe the black holes what we were going to do is take a photo of a black hole obviously the problem with this is that the black holes are extremely small and therefore it is necessary to have a black hole which is extremely large and therefore there is a need for a big telescope to visualize it a telescope like this which has a diameter of 100 meters is not enough it is necessary to have something much bigger that obviously cannot be built but it can create a virtual telescope putting in sync this telescope with other telescopes in other parts of the planet in fact you can build a telescope which is as big as the planet itself and what we did putting in sync telescopes here in Europe with other telescopes in the United States and one even to the South Pole and in this way we got an extremely precise high resolution of what a black hole is now what does that mean we have developed further developed and expanded our correlator capacity now we are one of the two correlator centers for the EHT together with Haystack Observatory but we also contributed to the continued backend development with our DBBC3 project and thirdly we played a major role in the outfitting the preparation of the ALMA array for the EHT observations we helped making the phasing of the 64 ALMA antennas possible so that now ALMA taken as a whole is a major contribution to the EHT technical capability