ann17015 — Mededeling
Attempting the Impossible: Taking the First Picture of a Black Hole
31 maart 2017: As part of an ambitious experiment involving telescopes around the world, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is about to attempt to image something never-before-seen: a black hole. For the first time, ALMA is joining the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and the Global mm-VLBI Array (GMVA), which are Earth-sized virtual observatories made possible by an international collaboration of radio telescopes. Their main goal is to study the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way in detail. The EHT will attempt to image, for the very first time, the shadow of the black hole’s event horizon, while the GMVA will investigate the properties of the accretion and outflow around the Galactic Centre. The impressive line up of participating telescopes stretches across the globe, from the South Pole to Europe to Hawaii — and, of course, Chile. ALMA’s 66 antennas, state-of-the-art receivers, and superb site in its southern location ...