The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 microarcseconds across — equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon. Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data – roughly 350 terabytes per day – which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.
Hoy se concluyó de construir la imagen de un Agujero Negro, que comenzó hace dos años. El viejo Einstein una vez más fue el gran adivinador. Ya es cierta la magia del cielo y el universo.
El Agujero Negro, a cambió de su mala fama de provenir de las sombras, nos devuelve el porvenir.
A millones de años luz existe la divinidad humana: un niño nos saluda desde el cenit. En el nadir todavía tiene deudas de desigualdades y de penas.
Hoy un niño nos trae la alegría, nos saluda con los brazos en alto.
Esta actividad será guiada por Andrés Urzúa de la Sotta (Viña del Mar, 1982), escritor, licenciado en Letras, magíster en Literatura, editor general de...
