Andrew Strominger

And it's both shaping that and in the process of talking to them and thinking about how light behaves around a black hole, black holes just have so many magic tricks and they do so many weird things.

And the photon ring is among the weirdest of them.

We understood this photon ring, and in the process of this, we said, hey, this photon ring has got to be telling us something about the puzzle of where the holographic plate is.

outside of a ordinary astrophysical black hole.

I mean, we nailed it for the stringy black holes, but they have a somewhat different character.

The black holes that are contained in string theory and they have different structure in them.

So here's the puzzle.

What they really saw, so the black holes tend to gather stuff that swirls around it.

And they don't know what that stuff is made of.

They don't know what its temperature is.

They don't know what kind of magnetic fields there are around there.

So the form of the image has a lot of unknowns in it that it's dependent on many other things other than the geometry of the black hole.

So most of what you're learning is about the stuff.

Now, the stuff, the swirling stuff, the hot swirling stuff is interesting as hell, but it's not as interesting as the black hole, which are the most, in my view, the most interesting things in the universe.

So you don't want to just learn about the stuff.

You want to learn about the black hole that is swirling around.

Yeah.

But you're not going to learn about the details before you've even seen it.

Yeah.

So then we found a very wonderful way to learn about the black hole.