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Eduardo Ros

Beyond the Event Horizon: Magnetic Fields and Jet Formation in Supermassive Black Holes

Biography

Prof. Dr. Eduardo Ros is an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany, where he is Scientific Coordinator of the Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) Department. He is currently on leave as Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Valencia, Spain, where he directed the Astronomical Observatory in 2013. 

In the late 2000s, he was both Research Coordinator at the MPIfR and Coordinator of the International Max Planck Research School for Astronomy and Astrophysics, managing the institute’s projects, academic programmes and communications. In 2019, he led the global communications campaign for the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which unveiled the first image of a black hole, a milestone in astrophysics.

With over three decades of experience, he has supervised more than ten PhD students and numerous Masters and Bachelor students, several of whom have won awards. Eduardo Ros has co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers with over 21,300 citations and an h-index of 64, demonstrating his impact and leadership in scientific collaborations.

Synopsis

Recent discoveries in millimetre-wave radio interferometry have transformed our understanding of black holes, capturing the first-ever images of event horizons in M87 (2019) and Sgr A*, the black hole in the centre of our own galaxy (2022). These observations offer a direct glimpse into the interplay of gravity, magnetic fields, and matter in the extreme environments near supermassive black holes. 

The latest findings on NGC 1052 reveal the potential to resolve not only the event horizon but also the mechanisms driving powerful relativistic jets. Using a global network of radio telescopes, we have confirmed the presence of strong magnetic fields near the edge of the black hole, providing new insights into jet-launching processes.

In this talk, I will explore the journey from the first black hole images to recent breakthroughs in high-resolution imaging, highlighting how magnetic fields shape the behaviour of black holes and their energetic outflows.

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