The Event Horizon Telescope is an international collaboration aiming to capture the first image of a black hole by creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope.
Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the technique used by the EHT to create a virtual Earth-sized dish, has been called the ‘ultimate in delayed gratification’ among astronomers. Radio waves from the edge of a distant supermassive black hole are captured using dishes around the world and the signals stored on banks of hard disk drives. It is only after these disks are brought together, and the stored signals properly combined, that we can achieve a magnifying power equivalent to a telescope that spans the distance between the participating radio dishes. Frustratingly for EHT...
On March 14th, the world lost Stephen Hawking, a luminary who inspired many of the scientists working on the Event Horizon Telescope project. Stephen’s work on black holes helped bring them center stage in our efforts to understand the universe. He was aware of the EHT’s goal of imaging a black hole event horizon, having visited the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) at Harvard in April 2016.
The EHT team has been analyzing data collected during our most recent observing campaign, and had hoped to be able to share the results with Stephen. Some EHT members...
The winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) is the biggest yearly meeting of astronomers and astrophysicists in North America. More than 3000 students and professionals meet to present and discuss the latest progress on many interesting topics at the forefront of research in astronomy and astrophysics. The 231st meeting...
Over the past two months, the EHT team has been working hard on processing a preliminary data set that does not yet include any data from the South Pole station. Using this data set, the team has refined the data processing pipelines that will be used to calibrate the data, and also tested many of the analysis tools that will be used to make images and search for signatures of strong gravity effects at the event horizons of supermassive black holes.
The wait for data from the South Pole is because the station closes for the winter, with no flights in or out from February...
Members of the EHT collaboration convened at the Black Hole Initiative in Cambridge, MA, USA, between October 10 and 13 to work together on improving and testing algorithms employed in production of images from data obtained with very long baseline interferometry. See the photo gallery here.
