Event Horizon Telescope

Sgr A* (center) and two light echoes from a recent explosion (circled)

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 Milky Way's supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* with angular resolution comparable to the black hole's event horizon.[1][2][3][4][5]

Overview

The EHT is composed of many radio observatories or radio telescope facilities around the world to produce a high-sensitivity, high angular resolution telescope. Through the technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), many independent radio antennae separated by hundreds or thousands of miles can be used in concert to create a 'virtual' telescope with a diameter of the entire planet.[6] The effort includes development and deployment of submillimeter dual polarization receivers, highly stable frequency standards to enable very-long-baseline interferometry at 230–450 GHz, higher-bandwidth VLBI backends and recorders, as well as commissioning of new submillimeter VLBI sites.[7]

Each year since its first data capture in 2006, the EHT array has moved to add more observatories to its global network of radio telescopes. The first image of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, could be produced as soon as Spring 2016,[6] and it will also test Einstein's general relativity at the extreme.[6]

Data collected on hard drives must be transported via jet airliner (a so-called sneakernet) from the various telescopes to the MIT Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts, USA, where the data are cross-compared and analyzed on a grid computer made of about 800 CPUs all connected through a 40Gbit/s network.[8]

Contributing institutes

Some contributing institutions are:[9]

References

  1. ↑ Viewing the Shadow of the Black Hole at the Galactic Center
  2. ↑ Polarimetric Imaging of the Massive Black Hole at the Galactic Center
  3. ↑ Main project website
  4. ↑ Overbye, Dennis (8 June 2015). "Black Hole Hunters". NASA. Retrieved 8 June 2015.
  5. ↑ Overbye, Dennis; Corum, Jonathan; Drakeford, Jason (8 June 2015). "Video: Peering Into a Black Hole". New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 9 June 2015.
  6. 1 2 3 O'Neill, Ian (2 July 2015). "Event Horizon Telescope Will Probe Spacetime's Mysteries". Discovery News. Retrieved 2015-08-21.
  7. ↑ MIT Haystack observatory
  8. ↑ Mearian, Lucas (18 August 2015). "Massive telescope array aims for black hole, gets gusher of data". Computer World. Retrieved 2015-08-21.
  9. ↑ Event Horizon Telescope - Collaborators. August 2015.

Further reading

External links


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