LES alumnus, Daniel Palumbo (Class of 2008), is currently a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and part of the team that recently made history by taking the first-ever photograph of a black hole.
EXCERPT FROM The Harvard Gazette (April 10, 2019):
“The EHT observations require measurements of light received from M87 every nanosecond in order to properly sample the incoming high-frequency radio waves,” said Daniel Palumbo, a Harvard graduate student at the CfA. “We capture and freeze that light locally at each telescope. Storing that information requires hundreds of terabytes of space, shipped around the globe for later combination by a supercomputer. High-quality data from a wide array of telescopes let us form images that we trust.”
Even though we only understood a few words from Daniel’s quote above (“telescope,” “light,” and maybe “radio waves”), we nonetheless wholeheartedly congratulate Daniel and the entire team at CfA and the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard on their amazing achievement!
Click to read the entire article at the Harvard Gazette.
Click here to read Daniel’s bio at Harvard.edu.
Click here to read an article by Daniel explaining the whole process (added to this post on 4-17-19)
(above) Daniel’s 6th grade yearbook entry.
Daniel Palumbo (’08), Then & Now
Click the image above to read more
about the black hole photo.
