The collaboration is led from the Center for Astrophysics, and includes the CfA’s SMA in Hawaii, the Greenland Telescope, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, the Submillimeter Telescope in Arizona, and the Large Millimeter Telescope in Mexico. This wavelength is observable by many large existing telescopes, so the EHT is a collaboration between those observatories. This matter emits light at a range of wavelengths around 1.3 millimeters, which fortunately passes through Earth’s atmosphere and the interstellar gas between us and the center of the Milky Way.
These images will provide valuable information about the behavior of matter right as it falls into the black hole. With the addition of four observatories, including CfA’s Greenland Telescope, the EHT continues to observe both M87 and Sagittarius A*. That combined power gave it the resolution necessary to take an image of the supermassive black hole in the giant elliptical galaxy M87. The EHT uses a method known as “ very long baseline interferometry” (VLBI) to yoke multiple telescopes together into a single virtual observatory the size of the planet. Despite their ubiquity and large mass, these black holes are relatively small in size meaning even our best telescopes can’t take images of them - at least when working alone. Nearly every large galaxy contains at least one supermassive black hole weighing millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun. Today we know black holes are common throughout the cosmos. That discovery was followed closely by the identification of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* in 1974. The first candidate black hole was Cygnus X-1, discovered by the Uhuru X-ray satellite.
These objects are so dense, they are surrounded by a boundary called an event horizon anything crossing that boundary can never return to the outside universe. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration The Telescopes and the Scienceīlack holes in the modern sense were first predicted as a consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1915.
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