Shep doeleman biography of martin

His research employs the technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry VLBIin which widely separated radio dishes are combined to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope. He has used this technique to study the atmospheres of dying stars, as well as stars that are just being born. His group at MIT has pioneered development of instrumentation that enables VLBI to achieve the greatest resolving power possible from the surface of the Earth.

When all the sunlight is blocked, you can see hidden treasures, like the corona. 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? 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. As one of the founding members of the BHI, Doeleman leads a team studying supermassive black holes with sufficient resolution to directly observe the event horizon itself.

He serves as a peer reviewer for the Astrophysical JournalScienceand Natureamong others. Doeleman received his B. With an appreciation for the challenges and rewards of instrumental work in difficult circumstances, he returned to complete a Ph. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version.

In other projects. Wikidata item. American astrophysicist. WilseleBelgium. Background [ edit ].