Uploads from ehtelescope

Currently Playing: Imaging with the Event Horizon Telescope: the magic of aperture synthesis

This is a demonstration of imaging of a common household object -- a teapot -- with the stations of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) array used in 2017. While the EHT is made up of only a few telescopes, instead of an Earth-sized mirror, we combine the telescopes into a network that detects the structure of the astronomical source we are observing. As the Earth rotates, the locations of the telescopes change in space, and we observe different features in the image. The longer we observe, the more information we obtain about the source structure and the more detailed our reconstruction becomes! This technique, called 'aperture synthesis', earned Sir Martin Ryle a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974. Credit: S. Issaoun, F. Roelofs, C. Brinkerink (Radboud University)