Presentation: Black hole astrophysics with a millimetre telescope in Namibia by Prof. Rob Fender
Black holes are the most extraordinary conceptions of the human mind, quite unlike any other objects in the Universe. Yet they exist, across a vast range of scales, in all parts of the universe, and are accessible to study with our most powerful telescopes. Some of these black holes shine brightly as matter spirals down towards them, producing as they do so incredibly fast and powerful outflows moving at nearly the speeds of light. Some of these black holes we see as they are born when massive stars collapse or incredibly compact neutron stars collide and merge. Some of these black holes loom so large in the sky that we can directly image their edges, the event horizon, from within which nothing, not even light, can ever escape to the outside universe. In this lecture, Prof. Rob Fender will present some of the cutting-edge results on black hole astrophysics in all of these extraordinary regimes, and he will demonstrate how a planned new facility, the Africa Millimetre Telescope, to be sited in Namibia will help to transform the field.
Rob Fender is Professor and Head of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Professor at the University of Cape Town. He is the recipient of the Herschel Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, for outstanding contributions to observational astrophysics, as well as an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant. In December 2022, he and Professors Markoff and Falcke in the Netherlands were awarded 14 MEuro ERC Synergy Grant, ‘Blackholistic’, to bring together our understanding of black holes on all mass scales. A key component of this project will be the construction of the African Millimetre Telescope (AMT) in Namibia which will both extend dramatically the baseline coverage of the Event Horizon Telescope and work as a stand-alone transient monitoring facility.
This presentation was held on 27 February 2024 at the Namibia Scientific Society.
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