“I’m afraid I don’t know what happens when the matter passes through the event horizon of a black hole and neither does Stephen Hawking”

Interview with Phil Charles

Black holes, those "cosmic ghosts" on which literature and cinema have based many of their stories, were no longer so mysterious when Phil Charles, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom), found in 1992, along with the IAC researcher Jorge Casares, the first empirical evidence of their existence in the Milky Way. From that moment, everything changed in the field of High Energy Astrophysics. Even today, he continues to investigate these binary systems, although he is also interested in all cosmic objects that are X-ray sources. Linked to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) since its beginnings more than three decades ago, Phil Charles has returned to this center as visiting researcher of the Severo Ochoa Program. >> Read the interview