Earth-Sized Telescope Set To Snap First Picture of a Black Hole (newscientist.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a New Scientist report: This week, we will have our first chance to take a picture of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The image could teach us how black holes work and even how the largest and smallest forces governing the universe fit together. The Event Horizon Telescope is switching on. It consists of eight radio observatories around the world, including telescopes in Spain, the US and Antarctica. And for just four or five nights between 5 and 14 April, if the weather is clear at all of the observatories, they will all turn on at once. Each telescope will point at Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, and measure every radio wave coming from its direction. Linking together observatories spread across such a huge area and combining their observations to filter out extra light will effectively create a powerful "virtual telescope" almost the size of Earth. These telescopes will together capture sharper and more detailed data than we've ever had from Sagittarius A, which we still know very little about, as well as the larger black hole at the centre of nearby galaxy M87. With the telescopes generating a total of 2 petabytes of data per night -- enough to store the full genomes of some 2 billion people -- astronomers hope to take the first image of the event horizon around a black hole, and the bright matter hurtling around it.

Comments

2 Billion Genomes??

[macxcool]

enough to store the full genomes of some 2 billion people

There's a useless comparison. Unless you're doing a lot of genome storage I'd think that you'd have no idea what that means.

Re:Perspective, Please!

[ScentCone]

It is a symptom of humanity's hubris to believe that an area the size of Earth is considered huge when measuring the massive black hole that sits at the center of our galaxy.

But what is it a symptom of when somebody complaining about that description completely fails to understand that the description compares the array to the size of a traditional, single observatory or an array located in one area ... and was not a comparison to the intended observational target? It's not "hubris." It's ... what? "Totally missing the point, but not missing the opportunity to sound a bit patronizing anyway?"