Don鈥檛 Miss: Learning about how the first black hole image was taken

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15 February 2023

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) ??? a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration ??? was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole???s boundary ??? the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name ??? is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 microarcseconds across ??? equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon. Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks ??? hydrogen masers ??? which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data ??? roughly 350 terabytes per day ??? which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers ??? known as correlators ??? at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration. — ESO

Visit

is a talk by Ziri Younsi, one of the team to take the first picture of a black hole (pictured above) using the Event Horizon Telescope. At the Royal Institution in London at 2pm GMT on 25 February.

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Read

is Jake Bittle鈥檚 compassionate account of the human geography of the US, as climate chaos displaces families, homesteads and whole communities, and states struggle to respond. On sale from 21 February.

Asif Kapadia?s film adaptation of Creature is in cinemas from 24 February (bfi.org.uk). The live stage version is at Sadler?s Wells from 23 March ? 1 April (ballet.org.uk) — BFI DISTRIBUTION & ENGLISH NATIONAL BALLET

Watch

is a ballet adapted for film by Asif Kapadia, inspired by Georg B眉chner鈥檚 Woyzeck and Mary Shelley鈥檚 Frankenstein. Creature (Jeffrey Cirio) is altered to withstand cold and isolation. In cinemas from 24 February.

Topics: book / Culture / Film

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