Dartmouth Events

Title:  The accretion process of gas falling onto black holes powers the most luminous objects in the Universe. Most of the energy is released near the event horizon, so that the photons astronomers observe encode information about strong field general relativity. My research is focused on using new observations that resolve characteristic scales in accreting black holes in space and time to understand the physics of this process and to use it as a probe of strong gravity. A particularly exciting opportunity comes from two ongoing experiments which are directly imaging gas falling into a black hole with event horizon scale resolution. I will discuss what we expect to see.