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Kazu Akiyama

@kazuakiyama.bsky.social

Deputy Project Scientist of EHT (@ehtelescope.bsky.social), @Heriot-Watt (@heriotwattuni.bsky.social), ex: PI@MIT (@haystack.mit.edu). Photographing black holes. Dad. @Edinburgh, Scotland🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿, UK🇬🇧 Tweeting in 🇬🇧/🇯🇵 Website: https://sites.mit.edu/kazuakiyama

49 Posts200 Follower 194 Folgt

Kazu Akiyama @kazuakiyama.bsky.social · 3mo ago

AIP provides an extensive summary of the WH's new regulations proposed for US science funding, which is imo quite damaging also for people outside of the US. Some rules will essentially force us to choose US or China for collaborations and conference organizations. www.aip.org/fyi/white-ho...

White House Plan to Take Over Federal Grantmaking Draws Criticism from Science Groups

Science advocacy groups are attempting to mobilize public comments on a proposed rule.

aip.org

Kazu Akiyama @kazuakiyama.bsky.social · 3mo ago

MIT、主要な四つの図書館のうち三つを閉鎖へ。閉鎖された図書館の司書さんら職員も解雇されたとか・・・去年の段階で色んな部門閉鎖して知り合いが解雇されているのを目の当たりにしましたが、研究や教育に関わる施設まで影響が及んでおるのを見るのは結構ショックです。

eileen chengyin chow@chowleen.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“I write with dismay, grief and sorrow for the permanent closure of MIT Libraries Barker, Dewey and Rotch, and termination of library staff in those libraries. For MIT to be closing three of its four major libraries..." fnl.mit.edu/may-june-202...

National Radio Astronomy Observatory - NSF NRAO @thenrao.bsky.social · 4mo ago

News You May Have Missed ⤵️ Event Horizon Telescope Results Trace M87 Jet Back to Its Black Hole Expanded telescope baselines, anchored by #ALMA, uncover fresh clues to how the supermassive black hole in M87 launched a 3,000‑light‑year‑long cosmic jet. #Astronomy #RadioAstronomy #BlackHole #EHT

Event Horizon Telescope Results Trace M87 Jet Back to Its Black Hole - National Radio Astronomy Observatory

The latest news from the NSF's National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

public.nrao.edu

Kazu Akiyama @kazuakiyama.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Me, an astronomer, reading this: 😳 Now I desperately need a statistical analysis on movie astronomers. Pretty sure 50%+ of us die in the first 10 minutes of disaster movies after saying "Uh, chief... you might want to look at this asteroid trajectory." www.science.org/content/arti...

Murder, monsters, occupational hazards: Why movie geologists die so often

Cinematic geologists are usually good guys—sometimes gals—but they have a one in three fatality rate, a film analysis show

science.org

Kazu Akiyama @kazuakiyama.bsky.social · 4mo ago

古巣MITの総長が資金難と人材危機に関するビデオを公表しています。・新税（基金運用益への8%税）と連邦予算の配分ルール変更で、研究資金が20%以上減少。・資金不足で院生の受入れを約500人（20%）削減へ。一緒に働いてきた職員の解雇・離職を目の当たりにしましたし、私自身が古巣を離れざるを得なかったのはこれが一因ですが、状況が改善することなく悪化していて悲しいです。

Kazu Akiyama@kazuakiyama.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Sad to watch the latest video message from the President of my former institute, MIT, sharing a "chilling" funding & talent crisis: • Federal research funding down 20%+ • Graduate intake to be cut by ~500 students (20%) due to budget strain & new 8% endowment tax www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xa0...

Kazu Akiyama @kazuakiyama.bsky.social · 4mo ago

A message from MIT President Sally Kornbluth

YouTube video by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

youtube.com

Kazu Akiyama @kazuakiyama.bsky.social · 5mo ago

This week I’m attending the Massive Black Hole Spin workshop at Edinburgh gathering experts a wide spectrum of astronomy using spins of black holes as a probe to explore the universe. Enjoying stimulating talks and discussions!

Martin Bourne 🏳️‍🌈@astromartin.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Just seen a fascinating talk by @kazuakiyama.bsky.social on the proposed Black Hole Explorer mission. A space based addition to the Event Horizon Telescope, it would allow measurement of the photon ring allowing the first direct measurement of black hole spin! www.blackholeexplorer.org #astro

Laura Lopez @ohdearz.bsky.social · 6mo ago

The @axisprobe.bsky.social team learned that the phase A concept study report of AXIS (the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite) will not be reviewed because the lost personnel at NASA Goddard and government shutdown impacted our schedule and budget. 🔭 Here is the PI's e-mail with the explanation.

Indeed, the AXIS Phase A work had major successes with furthering the key technologies. GSFC’s Next Generation X-ray Optics (NGXO) team successfully demonstrated iridium-coated, stress-compensated mirror segments that meet AXIS baseline requirements (i.e. segment-level performance at sub-arcsecond level). NGXO also built the first AXIS demonstrator mirror module, learning critical lessons about mirror alignment, mounting and bonding. On the detector side, MIT quickly moved to fabricate AXIS-like CCDs and, working with our colleagues at Stanford, recently demonstrated that they achieve the required readout rate and spectral resolution.

Similarly, NASA’s decision was NOT a judgment of the importance of AXIS science. The AXIS science case was rated excellent in the Step 1 review, and it only became stronger during our Phase A study. The AXIS Community Science Book, which many of you contributed to, is an extremely powerful demonstration of the relevance and importance of high-resolution X-ray observations to all areas of astrophysics. The Science Book is one of the most important legacies of the AXIS Phase A study and, I believe, will help define future mission concepts for many years to come. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for all of your work on this.

AXIS has been a long journey; we started under the leadership of Richard Mushotzky more than nine years ago. During that time, it’s been an enormous privilege to work with amazing people; the AXIS science team, the incredible/brilliant GSFC and Northrop Grumman engineers, and the wider astrophysics community. I am, quite frankly, livid that AXIS ultimately fell victim to the programmatic chaos of 2025. The astronomical community deserves better. I hope that NASA leadership, especially at GSFC and HQ, can have an honest discussion about how to better support and protect programs during extraordinary times.

For now, as a community, we must look forward. There is still one excellent mission under consideration for the Probe program, PRIMA, and we wish them a smooth and speedy path to selection and flight. In X-ray astronomy, the SMEX and MidEX programs represent concrete pathways for focused, high-impact missions, and the scientific case we built for AXIS provides a strong foundation for those concepts. The technologies we advanced in Step 1 and Phase A, particularly the NGXO mirror work and the MIT/Stanford detector demonstrations, can anchor the next generation of proposals. Most importantly, the AXIS Community Science Book, representing more than 500 scientists across, is a living document and a powerful signal to NASA leadership that this community is organized, serious, and not going anywhere. I encourage everyone to use it actively, as a resource for future concept development, for Astro2030 engagement, and for building the next mission that will deliver high angular resolution X-ray imaging to address the fundamental questions about black hole growth, galaxy evolution, and the hot universe that motivated AXIS from the beginning. This community built something remarkable over nine years and that doesn't end here.

Thank you again for your support of AXIS over these times.

Best

Chris and the AXIS leadership team

Kazu Akiyama @kazuakiyama.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Leaving the US and now seeing this in my new country. Given that the US FY26 budgets for mathematical and physical sciences ended up without significant cuts, it is hard not to feel that the UK’s leadership may end up undermining itself faster than the US.

Royal Astronomical Society@royalastrosoc.bsky.social · 7mo ago

The Royal Astronomical Society is gravely concerned at the drastic cuts to support for UK astronomy outlined by the Science and Technology Facilities Council. Read our statement 👉 ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...

Event Horizon Telescope @ehtelescope.bsky.social · 9mo ago

EHT Deputy Project Scientist Dr. Kazunori Akiyama (@kazuakiyama.bsky.social‬) has received a £4M Faraday Discovery Fellowship. The project, TomoGrav, will deliver the first dynamic 3D views of plasma around black holes. Read more: eventhorizontelescope.org/news/2025/12...

Kazu Akiyama @kazuakiyama.bsky.social · 9mo ago

JOB UPDATE! I'm moving to the UK after an amazing 10 years at MIT Haystack Observatory (@haystack.mit.edu). I have been awarded a The Royal Society's (@royalsociety.org) £4M Faraday Discovery Fellowship to be hosted at Heriot-Watt University (@heriotwattuni.bsky.social) in Edinburgh. (1/7)

Heriot-Watt University@heriotwattuni.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Scientists are creating the first-ever 3D movies of black holes. The work combines world-leading black hole imaging expertise with cutting-edge UK-developed AI. A huge step forward for world science. 👏 Read more: lnkd.in/eXRvfamF #HeriotWattUni @kazuakiyama.bsky.social

Heriot-Watt University @heriotwattuni.bsky.social · 9mo ago

The Royal Society @royalsociety.org · 9mo ago

Three outstanding international researchers are set to establish new research groups in the UK through the Royal Society’s fast-track scheme for global talent, the Faraday Discovery Fellowships Accelerated International Route. #RSGrants royalsociety.org/news/2025/12...

Leaders in black hole imaging, glaciology and human development to come to UK via Royal Society fast-track international route | Royal Society

First three researchers awarded Royal Society Faraday Discovery Fellowships through accelerated international route

royalsociety.org

MIT Haystack Observatory @haystack.mit.edu · 9mo ago

Congratulations to @kazuakiyama.bsky.social and colleagues! Good news for black hole research and for science. We will miss you but are very happy for you and @heriotwattuni.bsky.social!

The Royal Society@royalsociety.org · 9mo ago

Event Horizon Telescope @ehtelescope.bsky.social · 9mo ago

The EHT Collaboration recognizes outstanding contributions through the 6th Annual EHT Early Career & Outstanding PhD Awards. Featured here are three 2025 Early Career Research & Leadership Award recipients: Iniyan Natarajan, Paul Tiede, and Efthalia Traianou. Congrats to all!

Kazu Akiyama @kazuakiyama.bsky.social · 10mo ago

私の指導教官の本間希樹さんがEHTに関連する研究で仁科賞を受賞しました。EHTの黎明期は日本のプレゼンスを国際的に確立するために本間さんと二人三脚でやってきたこともあり、自分のことのように嬉しくとても感慨深いです。VLBIの分野では３つ目の受賞、電波天文学では４つ目の受賞になります。そう考えると電波天文学やVLBIは物理学分野でもかなり健闘していると思います。 www.nao.ac.jp/news/topics/...

本間希樹教授が仁科記念賞を受賞｜国立天文台(NAOJ)

国立天文台水沢VLBI観測所長の本間希樹（ほんままれき）教授が、2025年度（第71回）仁科記念賞を受賞しました。

nao.ac.jp

Kazu Akiyama @kazuakiyama.bsky.social · 11mo ago

今月からイベント・ホライズン・テレスコープ(EHT)の副プロジェクトサイエンティストとして、EHTの運営チームに加わることになりました。プロジェクトサイエンティストのDe Laurentisさんと一緒に、500名以上の科学者が参加するEHTのコミュニティの国際的な科学運用を取りまとめることになります。来年には初のM87の動画撮影の観測が始まる重要な時期でとても楽しみにしています。

Kazu Akiyama@kazuakiyama.bsky.social · 11mo ago

I'm happy to share that I've joined the management team of the EHT Collaboration (@ehtelescope.bsky.social) as Deputy Project Scientist! I'm honored to serve the EHT community—now over 500 scientists worldwide—as we enter this exciting era of capturing the first-ever movies of black holes.

Kazu Akiyama @kazuakiyama.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Sera Markoff @profsera.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Argh and I forgot the 🔭🧪 --> new black hole results look at first post! And also see: youtu.be/7P04NXrNp5U?...

New images of M87's black hole show its changing magnetic field

YouTube video by ESO Chasing Starlight

youtu.be

Sera Markoff @profsera.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Check out our new results on the M87* #blackhole w/ @ehtelescope.bsky.social ! We now have 3 frames in a 4yr "movie", including polarisation ⇔ magnetic fields. It's like tracking extreme sunspots just outside a black hole, the brightness and fields flip, yet the shape stays the same bc...gravity!

A tryptich of three images of the M87* black hole, from April in 2017, 2018 and 2021 (we lost 2019-2020 campaigns to technical/pandemic reasons). The fuzzy red donut shape is the same but the bright spot shifts in 2018 and seems to reset in 2021. Streamlines in the image indicate the polarisation vectors, that trace the magnetic field configuration. This too seemed unusual in 2018 and the whole field configuration flipped direction over the 4 year period!

Event Horizon Telescope @ehtelescope.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Groundbreaking new image! The EHT reveals the dynamic environment around black hole M87*. The 2021 image shows a distinct shift in polarization patterns, tracing changes in magnetic fields near the event horizon. eventhorizontelescope.org/new-eht-imag...

Event Horizon Telescope @ehtelescope.bsky.social · last yr.

Imagine a donut...now squash it🍩. That's what the black hole inside M87* looks like! New EHT research reveals that the squishy distortion is not due to gravity, but the turbulent, swirling plasma around the black hole: www.aanda.org/10.1051/0004... #space #blackhole #astronomy #astrophysics

Two glowing yellow and red rings (the black holes) against a black background and separated down the middle by a thin white line. The left black hole has a blue circle and white elliptical shape overlaid. The right black hole has just the elliptical overlaid, with white lines to show how the black hole aligns with the shape.

Event Horizon Telescope @ehtelescope.bsky.social · last yr.

🌍📡 The global Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team met earlier this month in Berlin for the 2025 Collaboration Meeting! 120+ researchers shared breakthroughs, planned 2026 observations, and discussed turning black hole images into time-lapse “movies.” #astronomy #blackholes #globalscience

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · last yr.

Breaking: NSF is suspending roughly 300 grants with UCLA, following a DOJ finding on Tuesday that the university violated Title VI by "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students."

MIT Haystack Observatory @haystack.mit.edu · last yr.

Congratulations to Haystack director Phil Erickson! Phil gave the prestigious CEDAR Distinguished Lecture on June 23 at the recent 2025 NSF joint Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) and Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) Workshop. www.haystack.mit.edu/news/erickso...

A man sitting in front of a slide for the Distinguished Lecture at CEDAR/GEM 2025

Kazu Akiyama @kazuakiyama.bsky.social · last yr.

昨年度後半に東京電機大の学部生さんとやった卒論のプロジェクトが、2026年度の入学案内でハイライトされました。日米で検討が進むBlack Hole Explorer Missionの地上観測網に対して膨大な数の観測シミュレーションを行い、その評価をやっていただきました。MITにも来ていただいて、日米の若手研究者の交流の一環ともなりました。 www.d-pam.com/dendai/25143...

Event Horizon Telescope @ehtelescope.bsky.social · last yr.

Could you starwatch all night? The IRAM 30-m telescope can!✨🌌 This observing mode is called VLBI, which involves telescopes around the world viewing the same object at the same time, such as a black hole, then combining the data to get super-high-resolution images.

Event Horizon Telescope @ehtelescope.bsky.social · last yr.

"You asked, we answered!🫡 Here are some of our favorite questions from last Friday's Reddit Ask Me Anything for #BlackHoleWeek2025 Have more questions about the mysteries of black holes❓Read the full thread here: www.reddit.com/r/askscience...

Question: How do you feel about the theory that our universe could be in a black hole?

Answer: This is a legitimately tricky question!

It turns out that the total mass contained in the Universe is approximately the same as what we would expect to be contained within a black hole that has the same size as the Universe, which seems to indicate that the answer to this question should be “yes.” However, we also have plenty of observations of how the spacetime and material inside of our Universe behaves, and much of this behavior does not seem to comport with how we expect the interior of a black hole to behave. For instance, we know that the spacetime inside a black hole looks like a contracting cosmology. However, observational cosmology tells us that galaxies are moving away from each other, i.e., the universe is described by an expanding cosmology.

Certainly, we do not appear to be suffering from the inevitable plunge into some central singularity that classical black hole interiors would suggest, which is perhaps the most salient thing to take away – i.e., even if the Universe is a “black hole” by some definition, it’s not something that we need to worry overly much about!

u/gravitomagnet1sm & u/maserstorm

Question:
What do you need to make a higher resolution picture?
Answer: The resolution of any telescope is determined by two factors: the size of the telescope, and the wavelength of light at which it’s observing. To make higher-resolution pictures we need to either increase the size of our telescope or observe at a shorter wavelength of light. The size of the EHT is already approximately the size of the Earth, so the only way to make it physically larger is to put telescopes in space – which is something that many people are already working on! As far as the wavelength goes, the primary wavelength of light that the EHT observes at – the one that was used to produce the first images – is 1.3 millimeters. The EHT has already made initial forays into observations at shorter wavelengths, in particular targeting 0.87 millimeters, and there have been successful detections! But these short wavelengths are really hard to observe, because Earth’s atmosphere gets more and more opaque as the wavelength gets shorter. So we have to keep improving the sensitivity of the array in order to push to these shorter wavelengths, which is a big part of the current and next-generation upgrades to the EHT!

Question: My 8 year would love to know how do black holes shrink?
Answer:
It turns out that there’s a way for black holes to “evaporate,” loosely similar to how water can evaporate on a hot day.

The details behind how exactly this “evaporation” – which is technically called “Hawking radiation” – takes place requires some fairly sophisticated physics knowledge. But the important thing to know is that it takes an incredibly long time for real-world black holes to evaporate in this way. For instance, a black hole the size of the one in M87 would take many, many times the age of the Universe to lose even 1% of its mass through this sort of evaporation.

Question: Is there suspected to be "quark matter" inside black holes like there is suspected to be inside large neutron stars?

Answer: From Peter Galison:

An astonishing feature of black holes is that from all we know, matter completely collapses, so no ordinary matter would be found inside the horizon. Not molecules, not atoms, not protons, not neutrons, and not even quarks.

Kazu Akiyama @kazuakiyama.bsky.social · last yr.

東北大の田中さん、東京都市大の津村さんにお声がけ頂いていて、天文学の最新成果を解説する本の執筆に参加させていただきました。第一線で活躍している日本を代表する天文学者の皆さんに混ぜていただいて、私は超巨大ブラックホールの章を担当させていただいています。このような著者陣が集まる本は貴重だと思います。来週発売だそうです！ぜひご覧になってください！ www.kawade.co.jp/np/isbn/9784...