A year after the first black hole image, the EHT has been stymied by the coronavirus
The scientists behind the first picture of a black hole are squeezing everything they can from the data they’ve got. A year after presenting a portrait of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 (SN: 4/10/19), the Event Horizon Telescope team faces a two-year data drought, thanks to technical snafus, security snags and a global pandemic. “The coronavirus has set us back a bit,” says astrophysicist Shep Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and the founding director of the EHT. “Nothing is immune, not even black holes.” The delay may push back answering questions about how black holes shoot speedy jets of charged particles into space, and could postpone our getting a clear view of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. But the team is still analyzing existing data and making plans to expand the observatory in the future. The EHT is a global network of radio telescopes that, together, form a telescope that’s effectively the...