EHT16 Talk Slides

The Event horizon telescope (EHT) is a project aiming to image the event horizon of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy using radio waves (and a lot of other cool science!). Their collaboration held a workshop this week and kindly invited me to give an overview of past, present, and future tests of general relativity. It was great to come back and visit Cambridge and hear about all the progress they’re making.

Here are my slides and a movies (right click and save [1] [2]) from EHT16. Enjoy!

Title: Present and future tests of general relativity

Abstract: We’re now a century after the conception of general relativity. With technology’s steady advance, observations are finally beginning to access the most extreme environments predicted by GR: the event horizons of black holes, both stellar mass and supermassive. As empiricists, we have the obligation to test GR in this new regime. I will review some present approaches to black-hole based tests of general relativity, comment on their shortcomings, and motivate future studies which will inform the next generation of GR tests.