Astrophysicist Luciano Rezzolla brings his research to life at EXPERIMINTA.
They are invisible and possess an incredible gravitational pull – yet visitors at the EXPERIMINTA ScienceCenter Frankfurt RheinMain can now quite literally grasp black holes. The exhibition is based on the work of Prof. Dr. Luciano Rezzolla from Goethe University’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, who is now making his research results permanently accessible to the public together with EXPERIMINTA. As a member of the renowned international Event Horizon Telescope team, the Frankfurt-based astrophysicist played a key role in creating the world-famous images taken of black holes in 2019 and 2022. Rezzolla emphasizes how important science communication is to him: “As physicists, we constantly deal with very general and often abstract questions. While these make sense to us, we often require support when it comes to making them understandable to the general public. The collaboration with our colleagues at EXPERIMINTA offers us an excellent opportunity to gain this support.”
Alongside the eye-catching Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way, visitors can view a three-panel display illustrating the fascinating journey from theory to practice: starting with Einstein’s field equations from 1915, moving through the early Schwarzschild formula, and culminating in the highly complex equations required to calculate the historic images.
For an object that emits no light and thus remains invisible, the idea of “touching” it poses a special challenge – yet the interactive stations enable visitors of all ages to explore the mysteries of black holes in a playful way.
