Photo credit: Inside the Perimeter / Hotaka Shiokawa
The European Southern Observatory announced that next week astronomers will make a major announcement regarding the Event Horizon Telescope’s study of the supermassive black hole Sagitarius A*, which is reportedly the release of the first ever picture of the event horizon of a black hole. To accomplish this, astronomers had to rig a network of radio telescopes around the world to coordinate their efforts in order to create a virtual radio telescope 8,000 miles wide. They used a very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) to can increase the resolution of the EHT’s network of radio telescopes once they are pointed at the same target, in this case Sgr A*.
The telescopes recorded data for several days and collected 1,000,000 Gb of data from telescopes as far away as Antarctica, making it faster to simply fly the hard drives to processing centers in the United States and Germany than to transfer them via an Internet connection. The first ‘groundbreaking’ outcome of that study will be announced on April 10 at 13:00 UTC (9:00 EST), with the event livestreamed.
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