A satellite orbiting the Earth could clearly spot the first ring, or hardware orbiting the moon could see the second.
Eventually, the research authors conclude, the collaboration should add a space-based observatory to their network. To spot the reflection rings, the EHT will have to go further still.
“They’ve already used up the whole earth just to see the first image,” Strominger says. Unfortunately, with facilities in Hawaii, Chile, Spain, and on the south pole, the EHT is running out of space. Because the successive black hole reflections (which would appear as rings to an observer) get thinner and thinner, astronomers need to harness more far flung observatories to see them. The farther apart the locations sit, the finer the features on the object they can resolve. Interferometers work by comparing observations of a distant point from two different locations. It’s also not exactly a telescope, but technically an interferometer. ‘What do we do with this? We took the picture, now what?’”īut the EHT is, like all telescopes, not perfect. “Sheperd and Michael were asking me about it. “It took everyone a little by surprise that they got such a good image so fast,” says Andrew Strominger, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University. But once the data processing was done and the champagne popped, the EHT collaboration in some sense resembled the dog who caught the car.
The feat-which pioneering black hole theorist James Bardeen called hopeless in 1973-represented a towering achievement of astronomical technology. On April 9, 2019, the collaboration at last released the fruits of their labors and the world gazed upon the first image of a black hole.
#BLACKHOLE PICTURE FULL#
As the director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a project involving an international collaboration of hundreds of researchers, he spent years flying suitcases full of hard drives around the globe to coordinate observations between radio telescopes on four continents, including Antarctica. It took Sheperd Doeleman nearly a decade to pull off the impossible.
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