Fall Astronomy Day Lecture

Jo Cline Memorial Astronomy Lecture

The Cline Observatory Jo Cline Memorial Astronomy Day Lecture featuring a prominent researcher in astronomy, astrophysics, or planetary science. The lecture is held each fall in Koury Auditorium at GTCC’s Jamestown Campus – it is free and open to the public.

First Pictures of a Black Hole! Imaging a Black Hole with the Event Horizon Telescope

Black holes are cosmic objects so small and dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. Until recently, no one had ever seen what a black hole actually looked like.  Einstein's theories predict that a distant observer should see a ring of light encircling the black hole that forms when radiation emitted by infalling hot gas is lensed by the extreme gravity near the event horizon.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a global array of radio dishes linked together by a network of atomic clocks to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope that can resolve the nearest supermassive black holes where this ring feature may be measured. On April 10, 2019, the EHT project reported success: "We have imaged a black hole, and have seen the predicted strong gravitational lensing that confirms the theory of General Relativity at the boundary of a black hole." This talk will cover how this was accomplished, details of the first results, as well as future directions that will enable real-time black hole movies.

Shep Doeleman is founding director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, a synchronized global array of radio dishes that achieves the highest angular resolution possible from the surface of the Earth. He led the international EHT team that recently succeeded in making the first image of a black hole.

Doeleman received his bachelor's from Reed College, then spent a year in Antarctica conducting space-science experiments at McMurdo Station on the Ross Ice Shelf. He completed a Ph.D. in astrophysics at MIT, then joined the MIT Haystack Observatory where he developed a research program of millimeter/submillimeter-wavelength interferometry and carried out observations that detected the first event horizon scale structures in supermassive black holes.

After serving as the observatory's assistant director, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012 and moved to the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian that same year. He is a Harvard University Senior Research Fellow and co-founded Harvard's Black Hole Initiative – the first center dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of black holes. He received the Lancelot M. Berkeley Prize and the Bruno Rossi Prize from the American Astronomical Society for his EHT work. He now leads the next-generation EHT project supported by the National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Visit the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) website.

The Jo Cline Memorial Astronomy Day Lecture is made possible, in part, by an endowment established by Don Cline in September 2015 with an initial funding goal of $50,000. Interest from the endowment provides annual ongoing support of the Jo Cline Fall Astronomy Lecture Series. Cline will match, dollar for dollar, contributions made to this fund until our goal is reached. Please consider honoring Jo’s memory by contributing to the fund. For information about, and donations to, the Jo Cline Endowment, visit our Support the Observatory page.

North Carolina Astronomers’ Meeting (NCAM)

Cline Observatory also hosts the annual technical meeting of North Carolina astronomers in association with Fall Astronomy Day. This event is open to professional astronomers and their students, and is not an open public event. The 2021 edition of NCAM will be Saturday, 25 Sept.

Past Lectures

2020

No Lecture held in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic

2019

Cathy Olkin, SWRI, "Exploring the Outer Reaches of Our Solar System"

2018

Gabriela González, LSU/LIGO, “Einstein, Gravitational Waves, Black Holes, and Other Matters

2017

John Mather, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, “The History of the Universe from the Beginning to the End: Where Did We Come From, Where Can We Go?”

2016

David Charbonneau, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “How to Find an Inhabited Exoplanet”

2015

Sean Solomon, Director, Lamont-Doherty Earth Institute, and Principal Investigator for the Mercury MESSENGER Mission, “The MESSENGER Spacecraft Mission to Mercury: Surprises from the Innermost Planet”

2014

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, University of Oxford, “The Last and Next 100 Years in Astronomy“

2013

Don Winget, University of Texas at Austin, “Small Stars in a Large Context:  All Things White Dwarf”

2012

Bob Benjamin, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, “A Visitor’s Guide to the Milky Way Galaxy“

2011

Francis Halzen, University of Wisconsin-Madison / IceCube, “Ice Fishing for Neutrinos“

2010

Giovanni Fazio, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics / Spitzer, “Viewing the Universe with Infrared Eyes:  the Spitzer Space Telescope“

2009

Hal Levison, Southwest Research Institute, “What Planets Are and How they Form“

2008

Neil Gehrels, NASA Goddard / Swift Mission, “Black Holes:  From Einstein to Gamma Ray Bursts“

2007

Michael Turner, University of Chicago, “The Dark Side of the Universe“

2006

Scott Ransom, NRAO-Charlottesville, “The Stellar Undead“

2005

Jeff Hester, Arizona State University, “From the Big Bang to Big Brains:  the Evolution of Structure in the Universe“

2004

Paul Butler, Carnegie Institute, “Extrasolar Planets:  a First Reconnaissance“

2003

Prasun Desai, NASA Langley, “Mars Exploration in the Coming Decade“

2002

Steve Murray, Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics / Chandra, “X-ray Astronomy Comes of Age:  the Chandra x-ray Observatory View of the Cosmos“

2001

Jay Bergstralh, NASA Langley, “The Galilean Satellites of Jupiter“

2000

Virginia Trimble, Univ. Cal-Irvine / Univ. Maryland, “Cosmology:  Man’s Place in the Universe“

1999

Robert Kirshner, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “The Universe:  Big, Old, and Accelerating“

1998

John Wood, NASA Goddard, “Resolution:  Latest Results from the Hubble Space Telescope“

1997

Bruce Carney, UNC-Chapel Hill, “How Old is Our Universe?“