Vantage Point
To see a black hole, Shep Doeleman ’86 needed a telescope the size of a planet. So he built one.
Shep Doeleman ’86 wants to make one thing clear: He never talked about folding the Earth in half to power Manhattan for a year, contrary to a satirical article published about him in the New Yorker.
“They actually misquoted me,” Shep says good-humoredly. “I think I said something like, ‘If the Earth became a black hole—if you crushed the Earth to the size of a marble—then you could power certain things with it.’”
Shep may not be folding planets like origami, but his actual achievements are more impressive. In 2010, he vowed to capture the first image of a black hole by the end of the decade—and in 2019, he and his team of astronomers fulfilled that ambition, using the virtual Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to glimpse the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
“Black holes are in literature, art, music, and comic books,” says Shep, who is the EHT’s founding director, a senior astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and a senior research fellow at Harvard. “The reason for that is that they represent the complete unknown. Neutron stars are great. White dwarves are great. But they don’t inspire songs.”
Shep was featured in the 2020 Netflix documentary The Edge of All We Know—and after capturing the first image of a black hole, he hopes to make the first-ever movie of a black hole. Amid his quest for singularity cinema, he spoke to Reed Magazine about his cosmic career and how Reed has shaped his quest to know the unknowable.
How did you become passionate about astrophysics?
When I was 13, I saw my first total solar eclipse—which is something akin to a religious experience. When all the sunlight is blocked, you can see hidden treasures, like the corona. There was a moment when we didn’t know if we’d be able to see it, because clouds were moving in. But thankfully, just at the moment of totality, the clouds parted and we were gifted with this amazing vision.
The Event Horizon Telescope has been described as Earth-sized. Can you explain what that means?
It turns out that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity says that these singularities, these black holes, are the smallest objects that can exist. We’re after the smallest things in the universe and we have to build a telescope that can see them.
The smallest thing a telescope can see in the sky is roughly the wavelength of light you’re observing divided by the size of your telescope. And if you go through the numbers, you realize you have to build a telescope that’s 10,000 kilometers across in order to image a black hole—like the black hole at the center of our galaxy, which is four million times the mass of our sun.
You can’t make a telescope that big out of one piece of metal. So imagine taking an optical mirror for a normal telescope, smashing it with a ball-peen hammer, and then taking those shards and putting them all over the Earth, orienting those shards so you can make a telescope as large as the Earth itself. And the way we do this is that we use existing radio dishes that are all around the globe [to record radio waves from the black hole], and they all swivel to point to the same black hole at the same time.
What do you want to understand about black holes that you don’t yet?
In movies, there are wormholes, where you get sucked into a black hole and come out somewhere else. Theoretically, those are possible—nobody has disproved those—and if we have any hope of seeing one or understanding if they exist, we want to be looking at a black hole.
Your work has been inspiring at a time when younger generations haven’t experienced many events that create mutual wonderment, like the moon landing.
There is also a connection—not just across the globe spatially, geopolitically—but across time. We feel very connected to Einstein and Karl Schwarzschild and Stephen Hawking and J. Robert Oppenheimer, people who did formative, seminal work on black holes. We use their equations every day and feel a great sense of connection to them. I call it the 100-year handshake. We really are comrades with the pioneers who came before.
How did a liberal arts education impact your career as a scientist?
There are some concrete things, like writing proposals: being able to craft a sentence and lay out a narrative that someone can understand, so people can appreciate how the thing you’re proposing to do fits into the larger whole—how it ties into the human experience, how it’s going to advance the field, and how it’s going to address the deep questions we can ask and hope to answer.
One of the things I got from Reed is that there is no one right path. There are many paths between where you are now and where you want to be in the future. Reed prepares you to be fearless—to jump off cliffs and invent parachutes on the way down.
Tags: Alumni, Climate, Sustainability, Environmental, Research