A global effort from 2017 that consisted of several telescopes linking up to provide an image from a galaxy far, far away. We finally received the image from that year.
This collaboration consisting of several telescopes located worldwide is known as Event Horizon Telescope. The telescope locations are as such, Hawaii, Arizona, Chile, Mexico, Spain and at the South Pole. The project aimed their telescopes to a nearby galaxy located 55 million light years away, Messier 87. However, the beautiful and haunting image of the black hole from M87 is blurry. Improvements in the quality of future images can be done with additional telescopes and technological advancements.
The process of collecting the image in the first place was using large amounts of petabytes of data stored locally at each telescope location. Collecting radio signals and using a supercomputer to compile each petabyte data to create an image. The complex analysis was done by MIT graduate Katie Bouman and her team. News and social media have taken a liking to bring a spotlight on the wonderful scientist. Encouraging young females in the STEM area.
Computer scientist Katie Bouman and her awesome stack of hard drives for #EHTblackhole image data 😍 — reminds me of Margaret Hamilton and her Apollo Guidance Computer source code. 👩🏽🔬 pic.twitter.com/MgOXiDCAKi
— Flora Graham (@floragraham) April 10, 2019
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