Astrophysicist Shep Doeleman and 250 researchers linked radio telescopes worldwide into an Earth-sized virtual telescope and captured the first image of the black hole at the centre of galaxy M87. Their next goal is a movie.
The first image of a black hole did not come from a new telescope. It came from linking existing radio dishes into one virtual instrument the size of Earth, synchronised by atomic clocks.
The hard part was not building hardware but persuading observatories to let an outside team bolt on equipment and retune their delicate instruments, then wait months to learn what was captured.
What I like most is the detail that the ring in the image is exactly the size Einstein's equations predicted.
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