While operating simultaneously at several observatories during a global pandemic is enough of a challenge, the technical problems of trying to image a black hole are almost as massive as the target itself. Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration What are the challenges of imaging a black hole? This image of Sagitarrius A* marks the first direct image of the Milky Way supermassive black hole’s event horizon. “We bring it together, and then we play the data back digitally, on the same hard disks, and then we combine them in software.” “Then when we bring them together, we're sort of freezing the light at these telescopes,” Blackburn says. However, it’s easier to ship the hard drives to the MIT Haystack Observatory and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy because of the volume of data taken from remote observatories. Masers are quite stable, only losing a single second every 100 million years.īlackburn clarified it’s not impossible to have the observatories working together simultaneously. Because hydrogen atoms have a known frequency, astronomers can chart the wobble to calculate the time the laser was fired. Each participating telescope must send out a microwave laser (or maser) beam at hydrogen gas, which, as the most basic element, is abundant in the sky. The data must be precisely timestamped, which astronomers do using atomic timing. “We record the radio signals captured in each of these telescopes at the same time, and then we computationally form a mirror by bringing the data together to a central location and combining all the data,” Lindy Blackburn, a member of the EHT collaboration and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, tells Inverse. A March 2022 campaign using all 11 telescopes observed a variety of targets, including Sgr A*, but the results are still processing. The EHT Collaboration undertook the just-released Sgr A* campaign in 2017, with fewer observatories, but it took a while to process the data. The goal is to have these various observatories working together to create a single virtual mirror powerful enough to image a distant black hole. In 2022, EHT a scattering of 11 radio telescope facilities located around the world using a technique called very long baseline interferometry. So how did the EHT get the job done? Event Horizon telescope technical details Imaging a black hole like this is extremely challenging, requiring astronomers to pinpoint a small target in the sky while dealing with amounts of data so vast that observatory personnel need to ship hard drives to other facilities for analysis. The historic first image of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) showcased its shape and activity in submillimeter waves, based on 3.5 petabytes of data from several telescopes. Last week, the planet-wide Event Horizon Telescope revealed a fresh view of the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy.
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