John Wardle

My research concerns observational and theoretical studies of the powerful jets which are seen to shoot out at close to the speed of light from the hearts of active galaxies and quasars, and also from some x-ray binary systems (dubbed “micro-quasars”) within our own Galaxy. These are thought to originate from the vicinity of black holes that range in mass from ten to ten billion times the mass of the Sun. I am also a member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration which images the event horizon of nearby supermassive black holes. On April 10 2019, we announced and presented the first ever image of the event horizon of a black hole (the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy M87. For this, the entire collaboration was awarded the $3M 2019 "Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics."