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Event Horizon Telescope Will Soon Take the First Black Hole Photo

posted by on Monday February 20 2017, @10:58PM   
from the photo-shows-Maximilian-Schell-looking-back dept.

Fnord666 writes:

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is finally ready to take a picture of Sagittarius A*. From April 5th to 14th this year, the virtual telescope that's been in the making for the past two decades will peer into the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy. EHT is actually an array of radio telescopes located in different countries around the globe, including the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile.

By using a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry, the EHT team turns all the participating observatories into one humongous telescope that encompasses the whole planet. We need a telescope that big and powerful, because Sagittarius A* is but a tiny pinprick in the sky for us. While scientists believe it has a mass of around four million suns, it also only measures around 20 million km or so across and is located 26,000 light-years away from our planet. The EHT team says it's like looking at a grapefruit or a DVD on the moon from Earth.

To prepare the participating observatories, the team equipped them with atomic clocks for the most precise time stamps and hard-drive modules with enormous storage capacities. Since the scientists are expecting to gather a colossal amount of data, they deployed enough modules to match the capacity of 10,000 laptops. Those hard drives will be flown out to the MIT Haystack Observatory, where imaging algorithms will make sense of EHT's data, once the observation period is done.

Source:

https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/19/event-horizon-telescope-is-ready/

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Original Submission

• oblig. oblig. (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @11:32PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @11:32PM (#469497)

  > Those hard drives will be flown ...

  Too much data for the internet, eh? Tell me again, what is the data rate of a station wagon filled with backup tapes?
    (at least that's the way I heard it first, but some of you may go back further...)

  The current equivalent might be scores of FedEx packages.

• Re:oblig. Re:oblig. (Score: 4, Informative) by zocalo on Monday February 20 2017, @11:54PM

  by zocalo (302) on Monday February 20 2017, @11:54PM (#469501)

  Sounds like it's actually a very practical approach to me. The idea is to get all the data into one place for analysis, and there's going to be a *lot* of data coming in all at once during the actual obervation, so that kind of limits your options right off the bat. Fast as modern Internet backbones are, the data rates coming in from large radio telescope arrays like those in the study are even larger (I did some work on the Square KM array, and it's just *insane* how large the raw data is before initial compression), so that means you'll need to do some form of store and forward anyway.
  
  Working out total storage requirements and using modules that can be shipped around means you only need one set of hard drives (hopefully a including some redundancy against failed/lost modules!) parcelled out to each location to record and do any initial clean-up/compression processing of the raw data. Those can then be shipped back at a reasonably leisurely pace (but *still* probably faster than using the 'net) to be reconnected back at a central facility where the combined data can then be processed. Planning has been years, observation time is going to be ten days, post-processing time is likely to be months, so a day or two in between for airfreight isn't exactly a major issue.

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  • Re:oblig. (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 21 2017, @01:26AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday February 21 2017, @01:26AM (#469532)

    Terabyte drives in a FedEx box can definitely outperform ordinary broadband, even to the opposite side of the planet.

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    🌻🌻 [google.com]

    Parent