CGC invited Prof. Don Page from University of Alberta to visit Yangzhou University on May 8, 2019. Prof. Page, a well-known gravitational physics expert (notably due to his work in Hawking evaporation), is the member of The Academy of Science of the Royal Society of Canada. He obtained his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1976. His mentor is Prof. Stephen Hawking and Prof. Kip Thorne (Nobel laureate 2017). He gave a public lecture named “Black Holes: Out of Sight or Now in Sight?”.

Abstract: Black Holes do not emit anything other than Hawking radiation, which is far too weak to be observed from astrophysical black holes, so they are literally out of sight. However, their strong external gravitational fields lead to the emission of gravitational waves by coalescing black holes that has now been observed ten times by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), and the radiation by hot matter spiralling into a black hole that has now been imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Therefore, although black holes themselves are still far out of sight, their effects have recently been brought much more convincingly in sight.