Committees

Photographing a Black Hole

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Using the EHT, scientists obtained an image of the black hole at the center of galaxy M87, outlined by emission from hot gas swirling around it under the influence of strong gravity near its event horizon.
Credit: Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al.

A team of astronomers published the first photograph of a black hole. The “monster,” as they’ve called it, is 40 million kilometers across (about 3 million times the size of Earth), located at the center of a galaxy known as Messier 87, about 500 million trillion kilometers away.

The image was captured by a network of eight telescopes named Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), and assembled with an algorithm developed by young computer scientist Katie Bouman.

Dr. Eliot Quataert is the Director of the Theoretical Astrophysics Center at UC Berkeley and an Editorial Committee Member of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophyics. His research focuses in part on black holes and galaxy formation. He spoke to Annual Reviews about this breakthrough.

What do you make of this announcement?

This is an incredibly exciting result. I was expecting something good but was even more amazed and impressed by the results than I had expected to be. It really is a testament to the hard work of hundreds of people over decades that we have been able to take this first real picture of what it looks like close to a black hole.

What new paths for research do you expect this will open?

The observations will continue to get better as the technology improves and new telescopes are added across the Earth, and maybe even in space. This will enable even better pictures of what the gas looks like close to a black hole. Over time, I think this will allow us to develop a better understanding of what is happening not only near the black holes that EHT can observe, but of all black holes across the Universe. This will impact a huge range of problems in astrophysics, from our understanding of how galaxies form and are affected by black holes to our understanding of the warped strong gravity very close to the event horizon of a black hole.

What articles can you recommend for readers who want to learn more about black hole research?

An older one, but famous, is “Black Hole Models for Active Galactic Nuclei,” by Martin J. Rees, in the 1984 Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Two recent ones on the role of black holes in galaxy formation are “The Coevolution of Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes: Insights from Surveys of the Contemporary Universe,” by Timothy Heckman and Philip Best, and “Coevolution (Or Not) of Supermassive Black Holes and Host Galaxies,” by John Kormendy and Luis Ho, respectively in the 2014 and the 2013 volumes of the same journal.

We’ve made all three of these articles freely available for 30 days.

David Zilberman, Co-Editor of the Annual Review of Resource Economics, Wins 2019 Wolf Prize

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Congratulations to Annual Review of Resource Economics Co-Editor David Zilberman, of the University of California Berkeley, who won the 2019 Wolf Prize in Agriculture.

Image credit: UC Berkeley, College of Natural Resources.

“Dr. Zilberman has incorporated biophysical features of agroeconomic systems to develop economic models and econometric decision-making frameworks to answer fundamental agricultural economic and policy questions in several important areas,” the announcement reads.

Read a few of his articles:
“Adoption Versus Adaptation, with Emphasis on Climate Change,” in the 2012 Annual Review of Resource Economics.
“Pest Management in Food Systems: An Economic Perspective,” in the 2012 Annual Review of Environment and Resources. 
“Agricultural Biotechnology: Economics, Environment, Ethics, and the Future,” in the 2013 Annual Review of Environment and Resources.
“An Alternative Paradigm for Food Production, Distribution, and Consumption: A Noneconomist’s Perspective,” in the 2015 Annual Review of Resource Economics.

Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics Co-Editor Ewine van Dishoeck Wins Kavli Prize, NAS Medal

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Screen Shot 2018-06-04 at 11.13.24.pngCongratulations to Ewine van Dishoeck, of Leiden University, who won the 2018 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics and the National Academy of Science James Craig Watson Medal.

The Co-Editor of the Annual Review of Astrophysics received the Kavli Prize “for her combined contributions to observational, theoretical, and laboratory astrochemistry, elucidating the life cycle of interstellar clouds and the formation of stars and planets.”

The James Craig Watson Medal was awarded to her “for improving our understanding of how molecules, stars, and planets form.”

Dr. van Dishoeck has co-edited the journal with Sandra Faber since 2010. You can find her articles about planet, star, and molecule formation here.

Warmest congratulations to JoAnne Stubbe – winner of the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize

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It’s always cause for celebration when someone you know wins a prize. For the Annual Review of Biochemistry, that person is JoAnne Stubbe, our Associate Editor who has won the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize which recognizes the accomplishments of outstanding women in science.

JoAnne was selected by The Rockefeller University to win this award for her work illuminating the mechanism of ribonucleotide reductase. She is the Novartis Professor of Chemistry, Emerita in MIT’s Department of Chemistry. Wellesley College president and renowned cardiologist and women’s health advocate Paula A. Johnson will present  the award in a ceremony at Rockefeller on Nov. 7 2017.

“It’s an incredible honor to be chosen to receive the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize — especially when I look at the extraordinary list of women who have received this award before me,” Stubbe says. “There were very few women in chemistry during the early years of my career, and while so much has changed, supporting and spotlighting the work of women scientists is still very important. My own mother and grandmother were strong, amazing women who encouraged me to pursue my passions, and I’m grateful to Dr. Greengard for creating such a special tribute to women in honor of his own mother.”

 JoAnne – all of us here at Annual Reviews hope that you enjoy the award ceremony, we thank you for your service to our nonprofit and on behalf of all women in science, we applaud your leadership.

MacArthur Fellows, Class of 2016

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Our warmest congratulations to the 23 people honored this year by the MacArthur Foundation for “breaking new ground in areas of public concern, in the arts, and in the sciences, often in unexpected ways.”

Among them is Dianne K. Newman, a Microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology and of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is also an Editorial Committee Member of the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Dianne Newman
Dianne Newman, 2016 MacArthur Fellow, Caltech, Pasadena, CA, 09.08.2016.

Dr. Newman’s research in microbiology spans across disciplines, from geobiology to biomedicine: she and her group study bacteria that thrive in low-oxygen environments, such as bacteria that “breathe” arsenic or iron, as was the case in Earth’s early atmosphere. This work has taken them to study the metabolism of Pseudonoma aeruginosa, an opportunistic bacterium that thrives in mucus-filled lungs where oxygen is limited, such as those of cystic fibrosis patients. This could open the door to more effective treatment of these infections. Browse the articles she wrote for Annual Reviews here.

Another 2016 MacArthur Fellow is Bioengineer Rebecca Richards-Kortum, of Rice University.

Rebecca Richards-Kortum
Rebecca Richards-Kortum, 2016 MacArthur Fellow, BioScience Research Collaborative at Rice University, Houston, August 31, 2016.

Dr. Richards-Kortum and her students create cheap and effective solutions that seek to redress imbalances in access to health care across the world. Their products have helped overcome challenges in the diagnosis of various types of cancers, but also for the care of premature newborns or babies with jaundice. Read her article for the Annual Review of Physical Chemistry here.

Photo credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.