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Hawaii News

Hawaii telescopes help create first image of black hole

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COURTESY EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE

The shadow of the supermassive black hole in the center of Messier 87. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion kilometers across.

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COURTESY SMITHSONIAN SUBMILLIMETER ARRAY

The Submillimeter Array, an eight-dish radio interferometer operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, pictured above, and the East Asian Observatory’s James Clark Maxwell Telescope are the two Hawaii telescopes involved in the worldwide project to create the first image of a black hole. The Submillimeter Array atop Mauna Kea provides high-resolution observations at wavelengths much longer than visible with the human eye.