Scientists set to unveil first picture of a black hole

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On Wednesday, astronomers across the globe will hold "six major press conferences" simultaneously to announce the first results of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which was designed precisely for that purpose.

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The EHT that collected the data for the first-ever image is unlike any ever devised.

"Instead of constructing a giant telescope—which would collapse under its own weight—we combined several observatories as if they were fragments of a giant mirror," Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the Institute for Millimetric Radio Astronomy in Grenoble, told AFP.

In April 2017, eight such radio telescopes scattered across the globe—in Hawaii, Arizona, Spain, Mexico, Chile, and the South Pole—were trained on two black holes in very different corners of the Universe to collect data.

Studies that could be unveiled next week are likely to zoom in on one or the other.

Oddsmakers favour Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our own elliptical galaxy that first caught the eye of astronomers.




Event Horizon Telescop

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a project to create a large telescope array consisting of a global network of radio telescopes and combining data from several very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) stations around the Earth. The aim is to observe the immediate environment of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way, as well as the even larger black hole in the supergiant elliptical galaxy Messier 87, with angular resolution comparable to the black hole's event horizon.[1][2][3][4][5]



A schematic diagram of the VLBI mechanism of EHT. Each antenna, spread out over vast distances, has an extremely precise atomic clock. Analogue signals collected by the antenna are converted to digital signals and stored on hard drives together with the time signals provided by the atomic clock. The hard drives are then shipped to a central location to be synchronised. An astronomical observation image is obtained by processing the data gathered from multiple locations.