The Event Horizon Telescope team achieves unprecedented resolution and opens new windows to supermassive black hole studies.
    • riodoro1@lemmy.world
      18·
      2 months ago

      Not how it works. They are not taking pictures with cameras. Resolution has more meaning then pixels.

        • remotelove@lemmy.ca
          3·
          2 months ago

          Radio telescopes. While I don’t know the complete process of how an image is created, it’s likely a composite of hundreds of thousands of points where radio wave strength was measured.

          A very basic explanation is that each radio antenna likely takes a reading of some kind for each equivalent pixel in the resulting image. Over time, you can build an image.

          Again, I don’t know the full details of how the full image is recreated. It seems super complex reassembling millions of data points from antennas that are located on a rotating earth that is also rotating around a sun. The position of the earth probably has a huge impact on radio signal strength at any given time.

          • JATth@lemmy.world
            4·
            2 months ago

            They could be very well using the earth’s orbit around the sun to get better resolution - two data points from opposite sides of the orbit. What I know is that the largest “virtual” radiotelescope is literally the size of earth. The data points are synced with atomic clocks (or better), and a container of harddrives gets shipped into a datacenter to be ingested. Thats hundreds of streams (one per antenna) of data to be just synced up, before the actual analysis even can begin. (I’m just guessing after this) At this point, you have those hundreds (basically .wav files) lined up at timepoints they were sampled (one sample, one timepoint column). So row by row, so you can begin to sort out signal phase differences between the source rows.

            I.e to put it shortly: an image is not taken, it is inferred and computed. Not that you even could in the first place, it’s a blackhole after all.

  • eskimofry@lemmy.world
    48·
    2 months ago

    Hehe title says highest resolution and thumbnail’s a blurry mess.

    Edit: wait the whole thing is blurry. Which means… we didn’t even have this before?

    What stopped us? Distance in space or that light simply escaped and we couldn’t zoom in on finer increments?

    • Mercuri@lemmy.world
      21·
      2 months ago

      Article says that it’s basically the equivalent of getting an image of a bottle cap on the surface of the moon from earth. At that kind of resolution the wavelength of light actually becomes a limiting factor. They’re using shorter wavelengths to get higher resolution.