The director of the Event Horizon Telescope project, which recently dazzled science enthusiasts worldwide with its image of the black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87 (M87), will receive the 2020 Lancelot M. Berkeley – New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy [https://aas.org/grants-and-pr
Sheperd S. Doeleman (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian) is being honored with the 2020 Berkeley prize for his scientific contributions to, and his leadership of, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT, https://eventhorizontelescope.
The EHT is named for the event horizon, the boundary of the region around a black hole within which the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. The event horizon and the volume it encloses are by definition invisible, but when a black hole is surrounded by a luminous disk of hot gas, as is the case in both the Milky Way and M87, it should be possible to see the gas shining just outside the dark region bounded by the event horizon, sometimes called the “shadow” of the black hole but more properly referred to as its silhouette. Yet even for the gargantuan black holes at the centers of our galaxy and M87, the angular size of that silhouette is only about a hundred-millionth of a degree. Only a short-wavelength radio telescope the size of Earth can detect something that tiny, and that’s why we didn’t see an actual image of a black hole until the advent of the EHT, which combines 1.3-mm radio signals from widely separated antennas into the equivalent of a single planet-size telescope, a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI, https://www.skyandtelescope.co
Each year the three AAS Vice-Presidents, in consultation with the Editor in Chief of the AAS journals, select the Berkeley prize winner for meritorious research published within the preceding 12 months. Reacting to VP Michael Strauss’s email announcing his selection as the 2020 Berkeley prize recipient, Doeleman said, “This is wonderful news. The credit truly belongs to the entire EHT collaboration. It has been a magnificent collective effort by an extraordinary worldwide team of talented scientists.” He will give his prize lecture on Wednesday afternoon, 8 January 2020, during the 235th AAS meeting [https://aas.org/meetings/aas2
Shep Doeleman received his bachelor’s degree from Reed College in 1986 and then spent a year in Antarctica conducting space-science experiments at McMurdo Station on the Ross Ice Shelf. With an appreciation for the challenges and rewards of instrumental work in difficult circumstances, he pursued his doctorate in astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT). After a research visit to the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy through a DAAD German Academic Exchange grant, he returned to MIT Haystack Observatory to develop a research program of millimeter/submillimeter-wavel
The American Astronomical Society (AAS), established in 1899, is the major organization of professional astronomers in North America. Its membership (approx. 7,500) also includes physicists, mathematicians, geologists, engineers, and others whose research interests lie within the broad spectrum of subjects now comprising the astronomical sciences. The mission of the American Astronomical Society is to enhance and share humanity’s scientific understanding of the universe, which it achieves through publishing, meeting organization, education and outreach, and training and professional development.