Don Sousa, who coordinates shipments for the MIT Haystack Observatory, speaks with Atlantic reporter Marina Koren about the complex process of shipping petabytes of data from telescopes around the world to compile the first image of a black hole. Koren writes that for Sousa, “the photo is the culmination of years’ worth of effort by astronomers and shipping experts alike.”
Writing for WBUR, Prof. Marcia Bartusiak examines the significance of astronomers capturing the first image of a black hole, and how information gathered from studying black holes could provide insights into the origins of our universe. “Continued efforts like the Event Horizon Telescope project will provide astronomy’s next steps in separating fantasy from reality,” writes Bartusiak.
Postdoctoral fellow Kazunori Akiyama speaks with Science News reporter Emily Conover about his work translating the data compiled from eight observatories around the world into the first image of a black hole. “I was really happy, really excited,” says Akiyama of his emotions after seeing the first rendering of a black hole.
Haystack research scientist speaks with Lowell Sun reporter Alana Melanson about how scientists at the Haystack Observatory made key contributions to creating the first-ever image of a black hole. “It's enormous volumes of data coming at you very, very fast -- much faster than you can record on a single hard drive,” says Fish of the vast quantities of data processed at Haystack to develop the image.
WCVB-TV’s Rhondella Richardson visits the MIT Haystack Observatory to learn more about how researchers there helped process the data that was compiled to produce the first image of a black hole. “It really does look exactly like what we expected it to, based on Einstein’s model of relativity,” explains Michael Hecht, Haystack’s associate director for research management. “There’s still a sense of awe.”
Science News reporter Maria Temming speaks with researchers from the Event Horizon Telescope about their work capturing the first picture of a black hole. Describing how the image was captured, Haystack research scientist Vincent Fish explains that the team was able to “reconstruct images, even though we don’t have 100 percent of the information, is because we know what images look like” in general.
Haystack postdoc Kazunori Akiyama speaks with Gizmodo reporter Ryan Mandelbaum about the effort to capture the first image of a black hole, and notes that in the future, additional observations should shed light on how the region around the black hole is changing. “By accumulating observations over the next year with additional telescopes, we can identify what’s changing the black hole image,” Akiyama explains.
Fortune reporter Chris Morris explores how the Event Horizon Telescope has captured the first image of a black hole. “We’ve demonstrated that the EHT is the observatory to see a black hole on an event horizon scale,” says Haystack postdoc Kazunori Akiyama. “This is the dawn of a new era of black hole astrophysics.”
WBZ-TV’s Ken MacLeod visits MIT’s Haystack Observatory to learn about how scientists there processed enormous quantities of data to develop the first image of a black hole. “My goodness, we just proved that Einstein was right at a scale that no one has dreamed of,” says Haystack’s Michael Hecht. “Most of us still don’t believe it’s possible, even though we have done it.”
MassLive reporter Kristin LaFratta spotlights how researchers from the MIT Haystack Observatory played a key role in processing the first image of a black hole. “This project has been my life ever since the beginning of it. It’s overwhelming,” says Haystack’s Michael Titus. “It’s something that’s been a long time coming.”
Haystack research scientist Vincent Fish speaks with Radio Boston about the significance of capturing the first image of a black hole. “It seemed like it would take forever for us to constitute an array to actually be able to make an image,” recalls Fish of the early days of the project. “Actually making an image, I’m glad to be able to do that.”
Boston Globe reporter Martin Finucane spotlights how MIT Haystack Observatory researchers played a “major role in the effort to create the first-ever picture of a black hole.” “I’m very proud,” says Vincent Fish, a research scientist at Haystack. “I’ve spent most of my professional life on this and I’m just really glad we got such great results out of this.”
Prof. Nergis Mavalvala speaks with Ira Flatow of Science Friday about how she and her colleagues are working on a new technology called squeezed light, which could enable LIGO to see even more of the cosmos. Mavalvala explains that squeezed light is “a somewhat exotic quantum state of light that we engineer in our labs to improve the sensitivity of LIGO.”
Postdoctoral fellow Dheeraj Pasham speaks with Ira Flatow of Science Friday about his research calculating that a supermassive black hole 300 million light years from Earth is spinning at half the speed of light. Pasham explains that a black hole's spin rate provides information about the “channel through which it grew, all the way from a couple of years after the Big Bang until now.”
Space.com reporter Mike Wall writes that researchers have calculated a supermassive black hole’s rotation rate by analyzing the X-rays it emitted after consuming a nearby star. The researchers found that “the huge black hole, known as ASASSN-14li, is spinning at least 50 percent the speed of light.”