Heidelberg 2022 – scientific programme

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SYAW: Awards Symposium

SYAW 1: Awards Symposium

SYAW 1.2: Prize Talk

Wednesday, March 23, 2022, 14:40–15:10, Audimax

Astronomy at Highest Angular Resolution - Adaptive Optics, Interferometry and Black Holes — •Frank Eisenhauer — Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics — Laureate of the Stern Gerlach Medal 2022

The last 25 years have seen wonderful times in high angular resolution, optical/infrared ground-based astronomy: active optics enabled ever larger telescopes, adaptive optics now routinely remove the image blur from the turbulent earth atmosphere, and integral field spectroscopy adds the third, spectral dimension to highest resolution imaging. And most recently, optical/infrared interferometry brought yet another revolution by synthesizing a telescope with an equivalent diameter of a hundred meter and more. This presentation will describe the development and advances in the field, and especially the pioneering SINFONI and GRAVITY instruments. The two instruments have been crucial to the discovery and characterization of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Galaxy, and have revolutionized the study of nearby exoplanets and star forming galaxies in the Early Universe. The presentation will end with an outlook on the next generation of interferometric instruments and extremely large telescopes, which are already in construction for the next revolution to come.