Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura

If you’re attempting to peer deep into space, Chile is a great place to try. Roughly 16,000 feet up on the sprawling, beige Chajnantor Plateau—where the high elevation and low humidity make for good visibility—more than five dozen antennae stare skyward.
These clustered radio telescopes comprise the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA. They are powerful instruments—but, on their own, even these aren’t able to capture a clear image of the black hole in the galaxy known as Messier 87.This insatiable, inscrutable portal is 55 million light-years from Earth, and 6.5 billion times more massive than our Sun. This week, the international consortium of researchers working on the Event Horizon Telescope project released the first image of the black hole—or actually, of its shadow, which is 2.5 times larger than the boundary of the hole itself. Producing the image required the assistance of more than a half-dozen telescopes across the world, from Chile to Mexico to Hawaii, and the efforts of more than 200 scientists. The project is so complex that collaborators “must all be a piece of a well-oiled mega machine,” says Sara Issaoun, a graduate student in astrophysics at Radboud University, in the Netherlands, and an observational astronomer on the EHT team.
The notion of the “planet-sized” telescope “is not just a turn of phrase,” says Joseph Farah, an undergraduate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics working on the EHT imaging. Observations poured in from radio telescopes at “high and dry sites at the most extreme locations in the world,” Issaoun says—essentially creating one huge, virtual telescope encompassing much of the globe.

The post Scientists Needed to Build a ‘Planet-Sized Telescope’ to See the Black Hole appeared first on FeedBox.