Blog

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...

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...

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...

231st AAS Meeting: Undergraduate Students Present Their Work on the EHT

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...

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...

Photos from the EHT Imaging Workshop Posted

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.

Award-Winning First Image of the Supermassive Black Hole in M87

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration had been awarded a number of prestigious awards and titles for its ground-breaking results in making the first-ever image of a black hole in the galaxy M87. The discovery was announced one year ago, and has been considered as one of the most interesting science stories of 2019. We are deeply...

EHT Status Update, October 5 2017

Most of the data collected in April 2017 EHT global campaign have now been through a first stage of processing at the MIT Haystack Observatory (Cambridge, MA, USA) and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR; Bonn, Germany). Computing clusters at these facilities have combined signals from sites around the world to produce "raw" data sets. Now the exciting task of further processing and analyzing these data is underway within a number of focused working groups. These groups are calibrating the data to remove instrumental effects and formatting the output for imaging and...

South Pole Telescope Photos Added to April 2017 Observations Gallery

The April 2017 Observations gallery has just been updated with new photos from the South Pole Telescope. These photos bring you inside the reciever cabin, outside on the telescope in temperature of -60 degrees Celsius, and under an Antarctic night sky illuminated by aurora autralis. Find a sample of the new photos below, and the rest in the April 2017 Observations gallery, alongside photos of telescopes,...

EHT Scientists Share What Inspires Them On Space Exploration Day

In honor of Space Exploration Day, commemorating the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969, Event Horizon Telescope scientists share what inspires them about space exploration and observation.

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For all of humanity, life begins as a profound voyage of exploration. Some of us are gifted the great fortune of never fully growing up. At heart, I remain an explorer. Every day, I set forth to confront the unknown, not on foot, but on blackboards, inside computers, and through telescopes. Thus, to me, the Event...