MCAIM Colloquium - Black Hole Imaging: First Results and Future Vision

In April 2017, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) carried out a global Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observing campaign at a wavelength of 1mm that led to the first resolved image of a supermassive black hole. For the 6.5 billion solar mass black hole in the giant elliptical galaxy M87, the EHT estimated the spin orientation and constrained models of accretion on Schwarzschild radius scales. This work relied on two decades of technical advances in ultra-high resolution interferometry and theoretical General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations. This talk will review these advances and recent new EHT results. We will also look to the next decade when a next-generation EHT (ngEHT) that doubles the number of participating radio dishes in the VLBI network will enable time-lapse movies of M87 that link the black hole to the relativistic jet it powers. For SgrA*, the Galactic Center black hole that evolves on time scales 1000 times faster, ngEHT will produce real-time video.