Search Talks

I will discuss the prospects for finding additional radio pulsars in the Galactic center region and their utility for probing general relativity and other constituents in the region. This will include discussions of neutron star populations; radio wave scattering in and toward the Galactic center; issues and progress in discovering pulsars; and the precision to which discoverable pulsars can be timed

GRAVITY is a new instrument combining the four 8m ESO Very Large Telescopes in Chile. Other than the BlackHoleCam / EHT with its focus on imaging the shadow of the black hole against the surrounding accretion flow, the goal of GRAVITY is to measure dynamical processes in the immediate vicinity of the black hole, for example the motion of matter close to the last stable orbit and relativistic effects in stellar orbits. Our presentation covers the experimental and astrophysical aspects of this project and highlights the complementarity with the submm interferometry to overcome the degeneracies in modelling the observations.

M87 is one of the most luminous nearby galaxies and hosts one of the most massive black holes known, making it a very important target for extragalactic studies. The supermassive black hole has been the subject of several stellar and gas dynamical mass measurements; however, the best current stellar dynamical black hole mass is larger than the gas dynamical determination by a factor of two, corresponding to a 2-sigma discrepancy. In this talk, I will review the gas dynamical black hole mass measurements that have been made over the years for M87, focusing in particular on the most recent measurement from multi-slit Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. I will also discuss the strengths and weaknesses generally associated with stellar and gas dynamical black hole mass measurement methods, and the current state of cross-checks between the two methods that have been carried out within the same galaxy.

Gravitational waves will allow scientists to test Einstein?s theory of General Relativity in the previously unexplored strong-field regime. Einstein?s theory of general relativity, as the most accepted theory of gravity, has been greatly constrained in the quasi-linear, quasi-stationary regime, where gravity is weak and velocities are small. Gravitational waves may carry information about highly dynamical and strong-field gravity that is required to generate measurable waves. Coalescing compact binaries are the most promising sources of gravitational waves accessible to ground-based interferometers, such as Advanced LIGO. Made of neutron stars and/or black holes that orbit each other hundreds of times a second just before they collide, the resulting waves are imprinted with information about the individual objects and the dynamical coalescence process. After reviewing the basic properties of gravitational waves, I will present an overview of the detector design and provide an update on the current status of Advanced LIGO and its ability to probe the strong gravity regime.

Some 40 years ago Hawking showed that if the black hole has a smooth horizon, then information will be lost when the black hole radiates. In string theory black holes appear to have a complete set of `hair'; these black hole states are called fuzzballs, and they radiate like normal bodies with no information loss. It was recently argued that structure at the horizon will necessarily feel like a `firewall' to an infalling observer. We will show that this need not be the case, since one can have `fuzzball complementarity' where an approximately smooth horizon appears as a `dual' description.

It has now become clear that the radio jet in the giant elliptical galaxy M87 must turn on very close to the black hole. This implies the efficient acceleration of leptons within the jet at scales much smaller than feasible by the typical dissipative events usually invoked to explain jet synchrotron emission. Here we show that the stagnation surface, the separatrix between material that falls back into the black hole and material that is accelerated outward forming the jet, is a natural site of pair formation and particle acceleration. This occurs via an inverse-Compton pair catastrophe driven by unscreened electric fields within the charge-starved region about the stagnation surface and substantially amplified by a post-gap cascade. For typical estimates of the jet properties in M87, we find excellent quantitive agreement between the predicted relativistic lepton densities and those required by recent high-frequency radio observations of M87.

The radio galaxy M87 is an excellent laboratory for investigating the formation process of the relativistic jet and the production mechanism of high energy particles and photons in the vicinity of super-massive black holes. VLBI observations at 1.3 mm can address at least two issues concerning the fundamental nature of M87. The first is the event-horizon-scale structure of the jet launching region, and another one is the production mechanism of very high energy (VHE; > 100 GeV) photons at there. In this talk, I report on new 1.3 mm VLBI observations of M87 with the EHT during the VHE enhancement in 2012. These observations provide the first measurements of closure phase, imposing new constraints on accretion-disk/jet models for M87, and also the first constraints on the innermost structure of the relativistic jet on scales of a few Rs during VHE variability. I discuss results and their implications for jet/disk models and also VHE models for M87, as well as future prospects of EHT observations of M87.

Because of the existence of a prominent jet, M87 provides an ideal source with which the EHT can critically test current jet launching paradigms. The EHT has already placed weak limits on the black hole spin based on generic arguments regarding limits on the image size. However, careful modeling of the jet structure can produce much more stringent constraints on both the black hole properties and the mechanisms responsible for the generation of the observed radio emission. I will describe how this modeling is performed, what the remaining chief uncertainties are and why we believe they can be controlled, and how existing EHT observations of M87 support models of electromagnetically launched jets powered by black hole spin.