The first pictures of a black hole ever recorded
were released today. Several high-powered radio telescopes, separated by thousands of miles, were synchronized to work together in order to capture the image.
Synchronization is necessary to enhance the resolution and sensitivity beyond what any single telescope is capable of.
The great distances between these telescopes is also by design, as distance increases effectiveness.
This synchronized array of telescopes acts like a telescope the size of the planet Earth, and was able to collect more than five petabytes of data. That's 5,000,000 gigabytes of data.
It took over two years to fully assemble the image.
