News

BHI Postdoctoral Fellowship Applications Are Open

Applications are currently invited for Postdoctoral Research Fellows in the Black Hole Imitative (BHI) at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO). The BHI is the first interdisciplinary research center worldwide to focus on the study of black holes. It is located within Harvard University at 20 Garden Street in Cambridge, MA. Current senior […]

Inaugural BHI Hawking Lecture Speaker: Kip Thorne

My Romance with the Warped Side of our Universe: From Black Holes, Gravitational Waves and Quantum Fluctuations to Wormholes and Hollywood Films Thorne will describe his ~50 year career exploring, with scientist and engineer colleagues, the Warped side of our Universe: objects and phenomena made from warped spacetime.  And he will describe his transition, over the past […]

Our 7th Annual Black Hole Initiative Conference Is Now Online

Our 7th Annual Conference is now available online on our youtube channel.

Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2024: The BHI’s Own Priya Natarajan

Shep Doeleman | TimeApril 17, 2024 For astronomers, seeing evidence in the sky of something predicted from pure theory brings with it a special joy. A burst of excitement as a puzzle piece falls into place. In November, a novel approach developed years ago by Priyamvada Natarajan brought us closer to under­standing a basic mystery in astron­omy: […]

Workshop: Bridging Scales in the Black Hole Accretion-Feedback Problem

Bridging Scales in the Black Hole Accretion-Feedback Problem

Physicist Netta Engelhardt is searching black holes for universal truths

Jennifer Chu | MIT NewsApril 9, 2024 As Netta Engelhardt sees it, secrets never die. Not even in a black hole. Engelhardt is a theoretical physicist at MIT who is teasing out the convoluted physics in and around black holes, in search of the fundamental ingredients that shape our universe.  In the process, she’s upending popular ideas […]

Astronomers Unveil Strong Magnetic Fields Spiraling at the Edge of Milky Way’s Central Black Hole

CfA astronomers led two new EHT studies that have produced the first polarized light image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy.

2024 7th Annual Conference

UNIFYING NATURE’S LAWS: THE STATE OF STRING THEORY

BHI’s Prof. Andrew Strominger participates in an event of the “Big Ideas Series”, which is supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation. Details can be found here: