Event Horizon Telescope

Event Horizon Telescope

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a global array of radio stations linked together to create a virtual radio telescope the size of the Earth. This massive instrument can achieve micro-arcsecond resolution on the sky, making it one of the most sensitive devices ever created, and enabling it to image the most extreme environment in the Universe: the event horizon of a black hole. The EHT represents the next generation of observation in the centuries long development of multi-messenger astronomy, and offers a new way to test general relativity in the ultra-strong gravity regime. Hidden behind the shadow of M87 is a singularity where our understanding of physics breaks down—and this is the story of how a team of astronomers from around the world pushed technology and physics to its limits to take the first picture of a black hole.

Joseph Farah is a Ph.D. student in astrophysics and National Science Foundation Fellow at UC Santa Barbara, studying supernova and experimental cosmology as part of the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) and the Global Supernova Project (GSP). His graduate research is funded by an NSF GRFP. He received his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Massachusetts Boston.

As an undergraduate, Joseph worked on the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project as a Smithsonian Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) under the supervision of the brilliant Michael Johnson. He helped produce the first image of M87 and led the development of novel techniques for analyzing and measuring the shadows of black holes observed with the EHT. He remains a member of the EHT Collaboration and is leading a paper describing a method for dynamically imaging sources such as the Galactic Center on short timescales as part of the effort to image Sgr A*. For his work with the Collaboration, Joseph was named a Barry M. Goldwater Scholar, a two-time finalist for the LeRoy Apker award, and a co-recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Outside of his research, Joseph is a digital artist and a competitive quarter-mile drag racer. He is also the CTO and co-President of Astraveo.