Capturing the First Portrait of Our Milky Way's Black Hole & Beyond

Explore the groundbreaking methods and procedures used to capture the first image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, in this captivating 44-minute lecture by Katie Bouman at IPAM's Diffractive Imaging with Phase Retrieval Workshop. Delve into the challenges of photographing a black hole shadow using the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of telescopes, and learn about the innovative techniques developed to overcome the Earth-sized radio telescope requirement. Discover how the team addressed the complexities of time-variability and interstellar scattering in imaging Sagittarius A*, and gain insights into the constrained phase retrieval problem. Examine the methods used to characterize morphology and uncertainty in the imaging process, and explore the scientific questions that drive future improvements in computational telescope technology. Conclude with a glimpse into upcoming research directions, including the potential to extract evolving structures of the Milky Way's black hole over a single night, possibly even in three dimensions.