The United States National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced the award of a $12.7M grant to architect and design a next-generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT). The principal investigator of this program is the EHT Founding Director, Sheperd Doeleman at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. The ngEHT will sharpen our focus on black holes, and let researchers move from still-imagery to real-time videos of space-time at the event horizon. The new award is aimed at solving the formidable technical and algorithmic challenges required to... Read more about Announcement of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Design Program Global Effort to Make First Black Hole Image Wins 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics The Breakthrough Foundation has announced today that the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration will receive the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, in recognition of their achievement of making the first image of a black hole in the galaxy Messier 87. The citation reads: “For the first image of a supermassive black hole, taken by means of an Earth-sized alliance of telescopes.” The$3 million prize will be split equally among all coauthors of the first six papers published by the EHT on April 10, 2019, which can be found...

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Global Web Tour of EHT Observatories

The Event Horizon Telescope is a global network of synchronized radio observatories that work in unison to observe radio sources associated with black holes with angular resolution comparable to their event horizons. The required extreme resolving power makes scientists and engineers go to some of the most extreme environments on the Earth to collect data. On EHT social media pages, Twitter...

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SXSW 2019 Panel Pitch: "EHT: A Planetary Effort to Photograph a Black Hole"

The Event Horizon Telescope needs your help! We have put together a proposal for a panel to be featured at the 2019 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, March 8-17 2019. Over 5,000 panels have been submitted to SXSW, but fewer than 1,000 spots are available. One part of the selection process are votes from the community, so please spread the word on the web and social media, and vote for our proposed panel via the...

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EHT Status Update, May 1 2018

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...

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Stephen Hawking Passes Away

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...

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