Artist's illustration of the detections made from the surface of Earth. Image: ESO/EHT
The virtual telescope was used to take the first image of a black hole in 2019, and now it is expected to take images that are 50pc more detailed.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has made the highest resolution observations ever obtained from the surface of the Earth, paving the way to learn more about the cosmos.
The collaboration estimates that they will now be able to make black hole images that are 50pc more detailed than what was possible before, allowing researchers to capture more details.
The EHT Collaboration aims to capture the most detailed black hole images ever by creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope. This is the same group that helped unveil the first ever photo of a black hole’s event horizon in 2019.
The virtual telescope is created through a technique called very long baseline interferometry – this essentially links together multiple radio observatories across the planet. But this creates challenges when it comes to making higher-resolution images, as the telescope can’t simply be made bigger to improve the resolution.
To overcome this issue, the EHT researchers focused on observing light at a shorter wavelength. These test observations were conducted by two smaller subarrays, which included the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
In these new observations, the collaboration was able to detect light from distant galaxies at a frequency of around 345GHz, equivalent to a wavelength of 0.87mm – a major improvement from the previous 1.3mm observations.
While there have been astronomical observations with higher resolution than this in the past, these are the highest-resolution ones ever obtained using only ground-based telescopes, according to the EHT Collaboration.
Dr Alexander Raymond, a study co-lead, said that in the 1.3mm observations, the bright ring of light bending around the gravity of black holes looks blurry because “we were at the absolute limits of how sharp we could make the images”.
“At 0.87mm, our images will be sharper and more detailed, which in turn will likely reveal new properties, both those that were previously predicted and maybe some that weren’t,” Raymond said.
The EHT believes that these more detailed images will help researchers uncover the mystery of how black holes attract matter and how they can launch powerful jets.
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