Santa Barbara Astronomer Bags a Black Hole

Joseph Farah of UCSB and Las Cumbres Observatory Was Part of International Team That Made Massive Discovery

BLACK HOLE SON: Joseph Farah, a UCSB graduate student and member of Goleta’s Las Cumbres Observatory, developed the imaging method used to observe Sagittarius A*, the black hole dwelling in the middle of our galaxy. | Credit: Courtesy

Joseph Farah moves fast. He thinks fast, he talks fast, and he even drives fast. On the weekends, the UCSB grad student and internationally recognized wunderkind of radio astronomy likes to drag race. “It distracts me,” he explained. “It keeps me sane.”

Instead of burning up the track last week, however, Farah flew to Washington, D.C., to take part in the Thursday press conference that unveiled to the world the first image of a supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Afterward, Farah and his fellow scientists attended a party at the Smithsonian Castle, where they were greeted by the institute’s director and basked under a wall-sized photo of their discovery. “It was wild,” he said.

Joseph Farah of UCSB and the Las Cumbres Observatory was part of the international team that made the massive discovery. | Credit: Courtesy

Farah was just 17 years old and a freshman at the University of Massachusetts when he joined the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, an elite team of more than 300 researchers from 80 institutes around the world who were assembled to seek out black holes. Farah was the only undergraduate. The EHT linked together eight existing observatories across the globe to create a single Earth-sized telescope, and for five nights in April 2017, they collected nearly four petabytes (4,000 terabytes) of data, an amount so massive it couldn’t be compiled over the Internet and had to be transported by plane on hard disks.