The Event Horizon Telescope
The Event Horizon Telescope is actually multiple telescopes acting as one for a very special mission.
Attempting to take the first images of the edge of a black hole. Actually the black hole that is sitting in the middle of our galaxy.
We live in amazing times.
from popsci.com
Scientists are trying to get the first direct look at the black hole at the center of our galaxy. How close will they come to seeing the unseeable?
Even without a telescope, it’s possible to look off the summit of Mauna Kea and see, 14,000 feet below and dozens of miles in the distance, wide swaths of rain forest touching the whitecapped Pacific. Down there, people are doing what people come to Hawaii to do: hiking to waterfalls, lying in the sand, exposing their skin to tropical solar radiation. Up here, there is no vegetation, no warmth and very little atmosphere. And as the sun sets over the parabolic aluminum dishes of the Submillimeter Array observatory, it’s time to work.
Over the next few years, Doeleman says, he and his group will combine as many as a dozen of the world’s most sophisticated radio-astronomy installations to create “the biggest telescope in the history of humanity”—a virtual dish the size of Earth, with 2,000 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. Tonight the Event Horizon Telescope astronomers have a more limited goal: They want to catch as much light from Sagittarius A* as possible and study its polarization to learn about the black hole’s magnetic field. But eventually (if all goes well) astronomers using the fully scaled-up Event Horizon Telescope—a machine with resolution high enough to read the date on a quarter from 3,000 miles away—will see the silhouette of an object that is, in itself, unseeable.
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