Sparking Imaginations With Black Hole Images: Chi-Kwan Chan at the OAE’s 4th Shaw-IAU Workshop
0Title: Sparking imaginations with black hole images.
This was a talk given at the 4th Shaw-IAU Workshop on Astronomy for Education, organised by the IAU Office of Astronomy for Education (OAE, http//astro4edu.org).
Black holes are regions of extremely distorted spacetime that not even light can escape. As predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity a hundred years ago, black holes have captured the public’s attention for many years and have influenced science friction, movie, music, and pop cultures. When we released the first ever images of black holes at the center of M87 in 2019 and our Milky Way earlier this year, students all across the world learned that black holes are real, and learned that through science, we can make predictions that were once beyond our imaginations. Using this opportunity, the EHT engages with students at all levels to promote astronomy, scientific thinkings, and mathematical reasonings. In this contribution, I will share the methods and lesson-learned from the EHT.
About Chi-Kwan Chan:
Chi-kwan Chan (CK) is an Associate Astronomer/Research Professor at Steward Observatory and the Department of Astronomy, University of Arizona, and has been serving as the Secretary of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Science Council since 2020. He recently led the publication of the computational and theoretical modeling/interpretation of our black hole, Sgr A*. Dr. Chan created EHT’s computational and data processing infrastructure and continues to lead it to this day, along with EHT’s Software and Data Compatibility Working Group. He is a Senior Investigator of Black Hole PIRE, a leader of the Theoretical Astrophysics Program TAP, a Data Science Fellow, and a member of the Applied Mathematics Program. In addition to pioneering the use of GPU to accelerate the modeling of black holes, Dr. Chan also developed many new algorithms to improve and accelerate modern research, built cloud computing infrastructures for large observational data, and applied machine learning algorithms to speed up and automate data processing. Dr. Chan has taught and mentored in subjects of machine learning, numerical analysis, cloud computing, and quantum computing, and is an avid hiker.
About the 4th Shaw-IAU Workshop:
The topic for this year’s Shaw-IAU Workshop on Astronomy for Education is ‘Leveraging the potential of astronomy in formal education’ and is scheduled to run 15 to 17 November 2022 as a fully virtual event on Hopin as in previous years. This year’s Shaw-IAU Workshop focuses on the role of astronomy in the core regions of formal, primary and secondary, education: How do we teach astronomy as its own subject? What is the role of astronomy in teaching physics or chemistry – or in communicating such a central future topic as climate change? In sessions marked with a * we aim to hear specifically from teachers. We also address the question of how to approach those who set the framework for teaching: How can you get your administration, or at a much higher level: your education ministry, to listen to you? Last but not least we look at how to bridge the divide between the fundamentals that are commonly taught in school and results from cutting-edge research, which tend to be fascinating to students and the general public alike. he workshop was organised by the IAU Office of Astronomy for Education (http://astro4edu.org). More details can be found on: https://astro4edu.org/shaw-iau/4th-shaw-iau-workshop/
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