Professor Heino Falcke MAE shares his experience of capturing the first image of a black hole.
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About Heino Falcke
Professor Heino Falcke MAE is an astroparticle physicist and radio astronomer at the Institute for Mathematics, Astronomy and Particle Physics (IMAPP) at Radboud University in Nijmegen (NL).
He has received numerous accolades for his pioneering work, including the Spinoza Prize, the US National Academy of Science Henry Draper Medal, and a knighthood from the Dutch King. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). His achievements include leading the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project that captured the first image of a black hole, a milestone in modern astronomy.
At the 35th Annual Conference of Academia Europaea and Conference of the Young Academy of Europe, Professor Falcke will present Towards the ends of space and time – the first image of a black hole, sharing insights from his work on imaging black holes and discussing the implications for our understanding of the universe.
Read the interview
Your work on black holes has earned you several prestigious awards and accolades. What initially inspired you to study black holes?
“Black holes seem like something out of science fiction and are regarded almost as mythical objects in science. They represent the farthest end of our knowledge; their ‘event horizon’ represents a fundamental barrier that allows matter, light and information to enter, but never return. You could jump into a black hole and experience its extreme physics inside, but you would never be able to share what you saw. ‘’
What really fascinated me as a physics student was the realisation that the two fundamental theories governing our universe—quantum physics, which explains matter and light, and general relativity, which describes space, time, and gravity—collide at the edge of black holes. Something new is waiting to be discovered there.”
The first image of a black hole was a monumental achievement. What were your immediate thoughts when you saw the image for the first time?
“I was awestruck and excited, but also extremely worried. What if it was all wrong? Would these results hold up to scrutiny? I knew there was still a long way to go to convince both ourselves and the scientific community of the validity of the findings.
What followed was, for many of us, perhaps the most intense but most memorable period of our scientific lives. In the end, the result closely resembled what we had predicted 20 years earlier. It is so beautiful to witness how physics can anticipate real world observations – in this case, the shadow of a black hole.”
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project is a global effort involving 200 researchers from various institutions around the world. What were some of the key challenges you faced in coordinating such a large and diverse team, and how did you overcome them?
“Coordinating a large and diverse team like the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, which now involves around 350 researchers from various institutions and cultural backgrounds, posed several challenges.
As astronomers, we weren’t accustomed to the kind of large-scale collaborations that particle physicists have been practising for decades; traditionally, astronomers work in smaller, often competing teams.
One of the key strategies I advocated for was the integration of expertise from different fields—technical, observational, analytical, and theoretical—into one unified collaboration. Drawing on my previous experience of co-leading a project that combined both astronomers and particle physicists, I knew the value of having different groups rigorously cross-check each other’s work. This was especially critical, given the high-profile nature of our project. Any misstep could have significantly damaged not only the project’s reputation but the credibility of the entire scientific community.
To ensure the quality and integrity of our results, we brought into our team not just the best minds, but also the most outspoken critics. This created a rigorous, self-critical environment, which was crucial for achieving reliable, high-stakes scientific outcomes.”
What are the next steps for the EHT project, and what new discoveries are you hoping to make?
“This is just the beginning. We want to test Einstein’s theory with even greater precision, under the most extreme conditions. Many extensions of General Relativity have been proposed, and we can constrain those as well. We also want to explore whether black holes rotate and drag space along with them. Plasma outflows can be partially powered by the rotational energy of black holes, a phenomenon that still needs to be proven. Black holes are the most powerful energy sources in the universe, but where and how do they produce this energy? To answer these questions, we plan to make movies of black holes. We recently secured an ERC Synergy grant to pursue this and build an additional telescope in Namibia. Other teams within the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) are working in this direction too. In the future we may look to space to capture images and movies with significantly sharper resolution, allowing us to test with precision the no-hair theorem and other predictions.”
Published 27th November 2024. For more information contact AECardiffHub@cardiff.ac.uk
