Event Horizon Telescope
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 an effective 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 in 2017,[8] and it will also test Einstein's general relativity at the extreme.[6]
Data collected on hard drives must be transported by 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 from about 800 CPUs all connected through a 40 Gbit/s network.[9]
Contributing institutes
Some contributing institutions are:[10]
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- ALMA
- APEX
- Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Arizona Radio Observatory, University of Arizona
- Caltech Submillimeter Observatory
- Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy
- European Southern Observatory
- Georgia State University
- Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
- Greenland Telescope
- Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
- Haystack Observatory, MIT
- Institut de Radio Astronomie Millimetrique
- Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE)
- Joint Astronomy Centre - James Clerk Maxwell Telescope
- Large Millimeter Telescope
- Max Planck Institut für Radioastronomie
- National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
- National Radio Astronomy Observatory
- National Science Foundation
- University of Massachusetts, Amherst
- Onsala Space Observatory
- Perimeter Institute
- Radio Astronomy Laboratory, UC Berkeley
- Radboud University
- Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO)
- Universidad de Concepción
- Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
- University of California - Berkeley (RAL)
- University of Chicago (South Pole Telescope)
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- University of Michigan
References
- ↑ Viewing the Shadow of the Black Hole at the Galactic Center
- ↑ Polarimetric Imaging of the Massive Black Hole at the Galactic Center
- ↑ Main project website
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- ↑ MIT Haystack observatory
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- ↑ Event Horizon Telescope - Collaborators. August 2015.
Further reading
- Non-technical: The Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy (2001), Fulvio Melia (Princeton University Press), ISBN 0691095051
- Technical: The Galactic Supermassive Black Hole (2008), Fulvio Melia (Princeton University Press), ASIN B008VQXCN2
External links
- Official website
- Peering into a Black Hole, New York Times video 2015
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