A team of researchers from around the world, including radio station operators and a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), converge to create the first image of a black hole.
This project has been underway for about twenty years. Project members patiently searched and gathered to create the Event Horizon Telescope.
Each group receiving radio signals will use a special device, assembled to receive data in the 239 GHz frequency range from April 5 to 14. This data is written to hard drives and sent back to MIT’s Haystack Observatory, where a team – using fundamental long-ray interference technology – gathered the data. As a result, it can produce the virtual image of a radio telescope as large as the earth. They are currently focusing on the black hole in the center of the galaxy, called Sagittarius A *.
You can’t image a black hole because light can’t reflect or escape from it, but the team hopes to be able to image the light around the black hole on the event horizon, before it disappears.
Sagittarius A * is about 26,000 light years from Earth and is said to have a mass about 4 million times that of the Sun. The event horizon is estimated to be approximately 12.4 million miles in diameter. Despite its enormous size, Sagittarius A * in the sky is extremely small, so to observe we need the rays of a radio telescope.
Scientists believe the resulting image will be based on an image of light around the black hole, but due to the Doppler effect, it will look like a crescent. And it will be necessary to wait until 2018 to see this memorable image.
