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Planet-Sized Telescope Connects Chile and the South Pole

Joint observations by the APEX telescope in Chile and Antarctica's largest astronomical telescope come closer to making detailed images of the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way, up to its very edge, the "event horizon”. Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy have participated in these successful observations in the framework of the Event Horizon Telescope – a virtual telescope as big as planet Earth.

Astronomers building an Earth-sized virtual telescope capable of photographing the event horizon of the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way have extended their instrument to the bottom of the Earth – the South Pole – thanks to recent efforts by a team of astronomers with participation of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany.

Last December, an international team of astronomers flew to the Southern Hemisphere: German, Chilean and Korean scientists led by Alan Roy of the MPIfR, traveled to Chile, and American scientists led by Dan Marrone of the University of Arizona flew to the South Pole to arrange the telescopes into the largest virtual telescope ever built – the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT. By combining telescopes across the Earth, the EHT will take the first detailed pictures of black holes.

"The goals of the EHT are to test Einstein's theory of general relativity, understand how black holes eat and generate relativistic outflows, and to prove the existence of the event horizon, or 'edge,' of a black hole," says Dan Marrone. ...