Editing 2133: EHT Black Hole Picture
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==Explanation== | ==Explanation== | ||
| β | This comic references the {{w|Event Horizon Telescope}}, an international project dedicated to imaging {{w|black hole}}s {{w|Sagittarius A*}} and | + | This comic references the {{w|Event Horizon Telescope}}, an international project dedicated to imaging {{w|black hole}}s {{w|Sagittarius A*}} and M87 with angular resolution comparable in size to their event horizons. The first image of M87 was released to the public on Wednesday, April 10, 2019, five days after this comic's release, and appeared on the same day in the comic [[2135: M87 Black Hole Size Comparison]]. |
The image was produced from data gathered since 2006, collected by over a dozen radio telescopes around the world and combined through a process called {{w|interferometry}}. Normally, a telescope's resolution is limited by the size of its aperture, but by recording radio signals at multiple sites, the minute differences between the signals can be digitally processed into an image with much higher resolution. The telescopes used for the EHT are in Hawaii, North and South America, Europe, and Antarctica, and so the effective diameter of the collective EHT is almost the size of the Earth itself. As each telescope recorded observations of the black holes, the results were written to hard drives and mailed to observatories at {{w|MIT}} and the {{w|Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy}} for processing. Astronomical recordings can involve astronomical amounts of data, so the raw, original, feed from a telescope may never be stored if it is too dense -- it is instead processed live by computers to capture the information of interest, and the processed result is stored. <!-- Should add remarks here about how many petabytes of data were processed and how much computing power and time was used, when that's announced. --> | The image was produced from data gathered since 2006, collected by over a dozen radio telescopes around the world and combined through a process called {{w|interferometry}}. Normally, a telescope's resolution is limited by the size of its aperture, but by recording radio signals at multiple sites, the minute differences between the signals can be digitally processed into an image with much higher resolution. The telescopes used for the EHT are in Hawaii, North and South America, Europe, and Antarctica, and so the effective diameter of the collective EHT is almost the size of the Earth itself. As each telescope recorded observations of the black holes, the results were written to hard drives and mailed to observatories at {{w|MIT}} and the {{w|Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy}} for processing. Astronomical recordings can involve astronomical amounts of data, so the raw, original, feed from a telescope may never be stored if it is too dense -- it is instead processed live by computers to capture the information of interest, and the processed result is stored. <!-- Should add remarks here about how many petabytes of data were processed and how much computing power and time was used, when that's announced. --> | ||
