Briefs · Frontier Science
How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole?
You cannot photograph darkness. You photograph the ring around it. Harvard astrophysicist Shep Doeleman and 250 researchers turned the Earth itself into a telescope, linking radio dishes from the South Pole to Mexico with atomic clocks, to capture the first images of the black holes in M87 and at the Milky Way’s heart. Four separate teams checked the data with different algorithms, so no groupthink could invent the ring. Einstein’s equations predicted its size exactly. The verdict is earth-shatteringly enormous: the next goal is a movie of an event horizon by the early 2030s, with a new telescope on Kilimanjaro.
Read the original at Quanta Magazine
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