Jiewei Huang

When two black holes merge, they shake the very fabric of spacetime. The newborn giant doesn't settle instantly (it rings like a cosmic bell, emitting a characteristic pattern of damped gravitational waves) the so-called ringdown.

A cinematographer filming a black hole faces a fundamental problem: light from different parts of the accretion disk reaches the camera at different times. The near edge flares up today, the far edge a week ago, and the jet trails months behind. If you splice all the frames without paying attention to age, you get not a movie but a collage of pieces from different times.