This virtual telescope is incredibly powerful. The location of Sgr A* in the Milky Way, above the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array © ESO/José Francisco Salgado (), EHT Collaboration By linking together 11 telescopes around the world, the EHT can effectively create one telescope with a mirror the size of the Earth. Hubble, James Webb and the ELT are all fantastic feats of engineering, and yet their mirrors are nothing compared to the Event Horizon Telescope. Meanwhile, the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope has a mirror diameter of 6.5m, and the primary mirror of the upcoming Earth-based Extremely Large Telescope is 39 metres across.
An amateur's telescope with a 60mm lens will show you a decent view of the Moon's surface or even Jupiter and Saturn, whereas the Hubble Space Telescope’s 2.4m mirror produces stunning images of nebulae and galaxies. In astronomy, the bigger the telescope, the better. The Event Horizon Telescope is often referred to as an 'Earth-sized telescope' and as a 'virtual telescope'. How does the Event Horizon Telescope work? From Earth, we can see it in the Sagittarius constellation, and it's over 26,000 light-years away. Sagittarius A* is in the centre of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The final image is the result of several individual shots averaged together. The Event Horizon Telescope, which detects radio frequencies, picks this up and registers it as a bright halo around the black hole. As this material swirls inwards at nearly the speed of light, friction heats it up and it emits energy in the form of radio waves. The glowing orange ring in this photo shows the matter surrounding Sgr A*, with the 'shadow' in the centre showing the black hole itself.Ī black hole has an incredibly strong gravitational pull, and will drag any nearby gas and dust into orbit around it.
Technically, you can't take a photo of a black hole itself – after all, the whole point is that no light can escape.