Shep Doeleman

Sheperd S. Doeleman , called Shep Doeleman (* 1967 in Wilsele , Belgium ) is an American radio astronomer. He has been the Director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) since 2017 . The collaboration announced the first recording of a black hole in April 2019.

Life

His parents are the Americans Allen Nackeman and Lane Koniak. Sheperd was born in Belgium because his father attended medical school there, but the family returned to the United States a few months later and settled in Portland , where Nackeman worked as a journalist. When Sheperd was 7 years old, his parents separated. His mother later married the teacher Nels Doeleman, who had two children of his own and adopted Sheperd and his younger sister.

Sheperd Doeleman graduated from Reed College with a bachelor's degree in 1986 and then spent a year in Antarctica to conduct space experiments at McMurdo Station. After completing his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy before returning to MIT in 1995. He became Senior Scientist and Assistant Director at MIT's Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts, and then went to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics , where he is Assistant Director of Observation for the Black Hole Initiative .

Doeleman participated in the first demonstration of the principle feasibility of the EHT in 2008. It was possible to observe Sagittarius A * at a wavelength of 1.3 mm and resolve bright regions of 37 micro-arcseconds. For this purpose, very low-noise electronics and digital data recorders with a very large bandwidth had to be developed. The underlying technology is Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), i.e. interferometry from the interconnection of distant radio telescopes. In 2008 only three telescopes (Hawaii, Arizona, California) were involved. At the time the images of the supermassive black hole in M87 were taken, eight telescopes from Hawaii to Antarctica were involved.

He also used VLBI to study the atmospheres of dying and newly born stars.

In 2012 he received a Guggenheim scholarship. In 2020 Doeleman and the EHT team received the Bruno Rossi Prize .

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Seth Fletcher: Einstein's Shadow: A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable. HarperCollins, 2018, ISBN 978-0-06-231202-0 , Part 1, Chapter 3.

personal data
SURNAME	Doeleman, Shep
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Doeleman, Sheperd
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American radio astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH	1967
PLACE OF BIRTH	Wilsele , Belgium

[1] Seth Fletcher: Einstein's Shadow: A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable. HarperCollins, 2018, ISBN 978-0-06-231202-0 , Part 1, Chapter 3.