EHT Status Update, December 15 2017

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 to October. The EHT data captured by the South Pole Telescope has been in "cold storage" since April, waiting for the cargo flights to resume. In early November, the EHT data disks were sent from the South Pole Station to a journey by air, sea, and land going through McMurdo Station on the coast of Antartica, through Christchurch in New Zealand, and Port Hueneme in California.

On Wednesday, December 13, the long-awaited shipment of hard disk drives from the South Pole finally arrived at the MIT Haystack Observatory. Half of the data will soon be on its way to the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, where it should arrive next week. After the disks have warmed up, they will be loaded into playback drives and processed with data from the other 7 EHT stations to complete the Earth-sized virtual telescope that links dishes from the South Pole, to Hawaii, Mexico, Chile, Arizona, and Spain. It should take about 3 weeks to complete the comparison of recordings, and after that the final analysis of the 2017 EHT data can begin!

Below are some photos of the data shipment from South Pole being delivered.

Shep Doeleman,
EHT Director