![]() Now, we can actually see the event horizon for ourselves as a physical phenomenon. Until now, the event horizon has simply been a mathematical concept, with its depiction in the movie Interstellar the closest to reality. And blurry though that photo may look to you, it's effectively 2000 times better resolution than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. The scientists then later compiled all the data together, using supercomputers at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany and the MIT Haystack Observatory in the US, to resolve the final image. They each produced about 350TB of data each day that were stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. As such, the EHT was formed by combining the capabilities of eight radio telescopes from observatories in six locations around the world, including the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, South Pole Telescope (SPT) in Antarctica, and the IRAM 30-metre telescope in Spain.Įach telescope's readings are tagged with precise time stamps using an atomic clock at the location. It involves detecting radio signals from an astronomical source using a network of different radio telescopes. Instead, the EHT researchers used a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI). Getting a picture required a truly heroic effort. The black hole in M87 appears 7 micro-arcseconds wide in the sky-that is, 1/250,000,000th the size of the full Moon. And though that may be possible in science fiction, we're incapable of building anything of its kind right now. Such a camera would have to have a reflector dish as large as our planet. That means they needed a camera with a resolution so high it could spot an orange on the surface of the Moon from Earth. To observe the black hole's center, astronomers needed a telescope with an angular resolution similar to that of the event horizon. "This is a landmark in astronomy, an unprecedented scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers." "We are giving humanity its first view of a black hole - a one-way door out of our universe," says Sheperd Doeleman of the Haystack Observatory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), also the lead astronomer at EHT. ![]() So what the scientists have done is capture the energy at the event horizon, the border just beyond which all of it is swallowed up. You see, black holes are generally invisible thanks to their intense gravitational field. The reason this is so spectacular an achievement isn't just because of the distance involved however. The image was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, a joint mission by astronomers from various countries, peeking at the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87, one that's 6.5 billion times larger than our Sun. We were able to reach across 55 million light years of space and capture a photo of a black hole for the very first time, after decades of theorising and calculating what it would look like. ![]() On April 10, humanity achieved a truly remarkable feat. ![]()
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