Making the ultimate darkness visible
Being an astrophysicist and father of two is no easy task. Just ask Dimitrios Psaltis. On a recent morning, the University of Arizona professor of astronomy and physics toggled between a recipe for French pancakes and a series of complex computer simulations tracing the outline of a black hole. “Life goes on,” said Psaltis, the 2016–2017 Shutzer Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, who is working on capturing the first-ever image of the massive dark void at the center of the Milky Way, the one scientists think is sucking up any matter or radiation that wanders too close to its event horizon, or point of no return. “In the morning, you do black holes,” said Psaltis, “in the evening, you make Nutella crepes for your kids.” Prioritizing his time is second nature for Psaltis, a lead scientist on the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, a multinational effort involving more than 100 researchers,...