HWM Singapore – August 2019

ALL THE PARTS OF A BLACK HOLE

PICTURES(BLACK HOLE IMAGE)

EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE COLLABORATION,

(BLACK HOLE INFOGRAPHIC)

ESO, ESA/HUBBLE, M.

KORNMESSER/N. BARTMANN,

(NTERFEROMETRY_GRAPHIC)

NATIONAL

RADIO

ASTRONOMY

OBSERVATORY

(NRAO)

A technique called very-long-baseline

interferometry (VLBI) was used to synchronize the

telescopes, exploiting the rotation of our planet to

form one huge, Earth-size telescope observing

at a wavelength of 1.3 mm.

A technique called

very-long-baseline

interferometry (VLBI) was

used to synchronize the

telescopes, exploiting the

rotation of our planet to

form one huge, Earth-size

telescope observing at a

wavelength of 1.3 mm.

Each telescope produced

about 350 terabytes of data

a day; stored on high-

performance helium drives

and sent to the correlators at

the Max Planck Institute for

Radio Astronomy and MIT

Haystack Observatory to

be combined and converted

into an image using

specially developed

computational tools.

By observing the bright

objects around the black

hole and the way the shape

of their shadows appear,

astronomers can infer

how the photons are being

affected by gravity, thus

giving them a hint of how

the black hole works.

EHT blackhole image

AUGUST 2019 | HWM 75