On the afternoon of October 13, 2026, a corner of Oxford, Mississippi will host a conversation about the sharpest images ever taken of anything in the universe. Richard Anantua, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas at San Antonio, will deliver a colloquium in Lewis Hall titled "Observing Jet/Accretion Flow/Black Hole (JAB) Systems – Towards EHT's First Black Hole Movies." The talk runs from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., with refreshments laid out at 3:45 in Lewis 104. It is free, open to the public, and requires no ticket.
Anantua is not a casual visitor to this subject. He was part of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration team that, in 2022, unveiled the first-ever image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way. That was only the second time in history a black hole had been photographed; the first, in 2019, showed the black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87. Anantua's contribution was on the theory side. As a theoretical astrophysicist, he specializes in what he calls reverse engineering near-horizon supermassive black hole observations, modeling and simulating the plasma physics that helped make those images possible.
The Event Horizon Telescope is not a single instrument but a network. It links radio observatories scattered across the globe and uses a technique called interferometry to combine their signals, effectively creating one Earth-sized telescope. That extraordinary aperture is what allows it to resolve structures at the scale of a black hole's event horizon, tens of millions of light-years away.
The method at the center of Anantua's Ole Miss talk has a name he coined himself: "Observing" JAB Simulations. JAB stands for jet (or outflow), accretion disk, and black hole. The idea is to account for the entire chain of events by which photons are created, propagated, and finally observed as synthetic images and spectra. By running general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations, researchers can test countless physical models of the emission coming from the region just outside a black hole, then compare the simulated images and light curves against what telescopes actually see. It is a way of working backward from a blurry ring of light to the fundamental plasma physics that produced it.
His abstract for the colloquium describes JAB systems as among the highest-energy discrete astrophysical sources in existence, and as testbeds for the extreme electrodynamics of billion-degree plasmas interacting in strong gravity around supermassive black holes. For Sagittarius A*, the method has shown that a turbulent heating-based Critical Beta Model for synchrotron emission compares favorably with existing 230 GHz size and asymmetry constraints, as well as dynamical constraints such as light curves, relative to model clusters based on magnetic-to-particle energy conversion. For M87, the work shows polarization in denser plasma varying rapidly and non-monotonically with positron fraction, while in more highly magnetized plasma, circular polarization cancellation occurs in the presence of positrons. Future intertemporal black hole observations, he argues, will be key to determining which plasmas are observationally favored.
That phrase, intertemporal, is the heart of the promise in his title. The Event Horizon Telescope has so far produced still images. The next generation of the array is expected to add observatories and improve resolution enough to capture black holes in motion, producing what the field has taken to calling black hole movies. Anantua's abstract puts it plainly: with impending dynamical horizon-scale observations by EHT, "Observing" JAB Simulations promises to be key in interpreting the first black hole movies.
Anantua's path to this work runs through some of the most selective institutions in the country. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and attended Stuyvesant High School before earning his undergraduate degree at Yale in 2010, where he studied physics and philosophy as well as economics and mathematics. He went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, and now leads what his group describes as the first EHT research group in Texas. He holds a joint appointment as an adjunct professor at Rice University, where he has taught since 2024, in addition to his position at UTSA, which he joined in 2022.
His work extends beyond computation. Anantua leads the EHT Outreach Group for the Americas and has built connections between the collaboration and networks supporting diversity in the sciences, including the NSBP/SAO EHT Scholars program. He is also a teacher of unusual range, having offered courses in electrodynamics, general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics, galactic dynamics, and introductory astronomy, along with a Berkeley course on the relativity of space and time in popular science.
The venue itself carries a bit of history. Lewis Hall, the home of the University of Mississippi's Department of Physics and Astronomy, dates to 1939, according to state archives, and the department's offices sit at 108 Lewis Hall. A talk about the edge of a black hole, delivered in a building that predates the first satellites, is a fitting collision of eras.
For anyone in or near Oxford with even a passing curiosity about what happens when matter falls into a supermassive black hole, this is an unusual opportunity. Cutting-edge astrophysics of this kind usually arrives in Mississippi in the form of a press release, not a live speaker who helped produce the images. The colloquium is open to all, and the refreshments, at least, require no background in general relativity.