Happy Birthday to Space-Time - The Event Horizon Telescope
The Event Horizon telescope is doing a 21st century test of Einstein's 100 year-old theory of General Relativity by seeing if black holes look like theory says they should.
A new telescope array will be attempting to take pictures of a black hole
The most extreme implication of General Relativity, and one which Einstein himself found disturbing, was the prediction that sufficiently massive objects could undergo gravitational collapse into infinitely dense gravitational singularities - more popularly known as Black Holes. But while astronomers are convinced that Black Holes exist, because of their indirect effects on things around them, they've never seen one directly.
Now, a team of astronomers led by Dr. Sheperd Doeleman, Assistant Director of the MIT Haystack Observatory, and an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is trying to change that with the Event Horizon Telescope.
The EHT is, in fact, a large array of telescopes around the world, acting together with remarkable precision to take a single, high-resolution image of the Black Hole at the centre of our galaxy. The images they hope to take, in the next year or two, will tell us if the Black Hole looks and behaves the way Einstein's theory predicts it should.
Related Links
- Event Horizon Telescope
- New York Times article - Black Hole Hunters