OSC Colloquium: Katie Bouman

This talk will present the methods and procedures used to capture an image of a black hole from the Event Horizon Telescope, as well as discuss future developments for black hole imaging. Imaging a black hole’s structure requires us to reconstruct images from sparse, noisy, measurements collected from a global network of telescopes. Synergies between the development of new instrumentation and image reconstruction techniques led to the first image of a black hole, M87*, in 2019. However, remaining scientific questions motivate us to improve this computational telescope to see black hole phenomena still invisible to us. This talk will summarize how the data from the 2017 observations were calibrated and imaged, and explain some of the challenges that arise with a heterogeneous telescope array like the EHT. The talk will also discuss future developments, including deep variational Bayesian imaging techniques for uncertainty quantification and how we are developing machine learning approaches to help optimize the design of future telescope arrays to image phenomena still invisible to us.