Black holes strongly curve light rays, and therefore in their presence light sources connect to observers along multiple paths. As a result, brightness fluctuations in black hole observations must be correlated in intricate ways. In the talk I will describe a prediction for such correlations in black hole (time-dependent) images, which are expected to become available in the next few years thanks to the next-generation Event Horizon Telescope. I will first give general background on black holes.
I am a theoretical physicist studying gravitational physics, with a particular interest in black holes. After completing my PhD at the Hebrew University under the supervision of Prof. Barak Kol, I held postdoc positions at Cambridge UK, the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Potsdam, and Harvard University. Last year I joined the faculty of the department of mathematics, physics, and computer science of the University of Haifa at Oranim.
In this talk I will review the large effort to understand the first billion years of our cosmic history. During this period the first light-emitting objects formed. These first objects ushered the Universe into a new era and changed the early pristine Universe to the galaxy, star and planet-filled one we observe around us. This effort is multi-disciplinary in nature with contributions from astronomers, engineers and computer scientists and involved peta bites of data and computer-intensive calibration (essentially, an inversion problem).
Prof. Saleem Zaroubi grew up in Nazareth. He obtained his BSc and MSc from the Technion & his PhD from the Hebrew University, all in Physics. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Physics and Astronomy departments, University of California at Berkley, and then a research associate at the Max Planck Institute from Astrophysics near Munich. He is a professor at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, which he joined in 2004. Since 2016 he is also a professor at the Department of Natural and Life Sciences at the Open University. He is the chair of the newly established Astrophysics Research Center at the Open University (ARCO). In 2004 he founded, with two other Dutch colleagues, the LOFAR Epoch of Reionization project, one of the pioneering projects in the quest to explore the first billion years in the Universe’s history. He has just been awarded the 2022 Humboldt Research Prize for his research achievements by the Alexander von Humboldt foundation. Prof. Zaroubi writes about science to the wider populic in Arabic and has recently published, also in Arabic, a book entitled “In the Beginning: Physics, Philosophy and History of Cosmology”.