BOLDLY KNOWING
Astrophysicist cracks black hole code
● Friends tell Tariq Blecher he looks like former Manchester United midfielder Marouane Fellaini, but the laid-back 27year-old Rhodes University PhD student is more interested in black holes than yellow cards.
Blecher’s master’s paper on software used in astronomy was cited in two of the six papers released on Thursday by the Event Horizon Telescope group, which showed the world the “unseeable”: a black hole.
A black hole is an astronomical phenomenon that exhibits such strong gravitational effects that nothing — not even particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light— can escape from inside it.
The image was obtained by an international collaboration involving 200 scientists and engineers who linked some of the world’s most advanced radio telescopes to effectively see images of the super-massive black hole in the galaxy known as M87.
Part of the collaboration was University of Pretoria (UP) researcher, astrophysicist and associate professor Roger Deane, 36, who was involved in building a simulation of what the telescope would find.
Deane, who is one of Blecher’s three PhD supervisors, and his team used the computer code that Blecher created for his master’s degree to build the theoretical simulation of what a black hole photo should look like in imperfect conditions. This simulation helped scientists understand the experimental data from the eight telescopes across the globe.
Blecher, who was drinking champagne at the UP black hole photo launch this week, laughed as he simplified black hole physics into easy soundbites even a child would understand. He quoted philosopher Immanuel Kant and sheepishly said his latest intellectual hobby is “complexity systems”, which he worries sounds “arrogant”.
One of his three PhD supervisors is at Oxford, where he spent a month in 2017, and another is in Perth, where he recently spent six weeks. Having three supervisors in three countries is “an unusual arrangement”.
But Blecher enjoys the travel, and he also won a place at the Lindau Nobel Laureate meetings in Germany to be held in July, where Europe’s top young scientists and Nobel laureates in physics will spend a few days on an island sharing ideas.
Blecher does his research from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) head office in Cape Town and uses the Australian Pathfinder telescope — a precursor to SKA — for his PhD. In his first year at the University of Cape Town (UCT) he switched from microbiology to physics — a decision he made without much thought. But in his “naive wisdom” it worked out.
He graduated from UCT in 2014 with an honours degree in physics. He obtained his MSc in astronomy from Rhodes in 2016 and is now working on his PhD in astrophysics. He said it is still difficult for him to comprehend that the black hole is 55-million light years away.
“The first hurdle with astronomy is trying to develop a feeling for a huge distance. You learn to think in an almost different time. It is conceptualising on a huge scale.”
“The distance of the Earth to the centre of our galaxy becomes as familiar as the distance from Cape Town to Plettenberg Bay once you get used to the system.”
Blecher said people struggle to understand the night sky as the school curriculum stops at the solar system. “Most of us understand the solar system and built planet models at schools [but] we need to zoom out to other galaxies.”