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*. Read more for another video and additional information./
“The telescopes recorded data for several days and gathered 1,000,000 Gb of data from telescopes as far away as Antarctica, so much in fact that it was quicker to just fly the hard drives to processing labs in the United States and Germany than to try and upload them over an Internet connection. The first ‘groundbreaking’ result of that work is finally going to be announced on April 10 at 13:00 UTC, 9:00 EST, while the event itself will be livestreamed,” according to Interesting Engineering.
