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ESO will be Announcing the First Black Hole Picture on April 10

The rumours you’ve heard are true. And if you haven’t heard the rumours, you should check your internet connection.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has set an important press conference for April 10th, involving the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). They haven’t come right out and said it, but the Media Advisory from the ESO says they will, “hold a press conference to present a ground-breaking result from the EHT.” If it’s not a black hole, then well-played ESO, well-played.

But of course it’ll be to announce the first picture of a black hole. That’s what the Event Horizon Telescope is all about. The EHT is an international effort to get the first picture of a black hole, and they’re doing it by creating a “virtual telescope” the size of the Earth.

The virtual telescope is more properly called a Very Long Baseline Interferometer. What that means is they’ve linked up radio antennae around the globe to observe the same object. This creates what telescope nerds call “high angular resolving power.” Basically, the bigger the ‘scope, the more detail we can see. And no telescope is as big as the Earth, except for the EHT.
What will the black hole look like?

Back in October 2018, the EHT released a simulated image of what they think they’ll see. Keep in mind, that scientists with the EHT will actually capture images of the black hole’s event horizon, because black holes don’t allow any light to escape. But in some respects, it’s the event horizon that is the business end of the black hole.

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So in the mid-2000s, scientists began to MacGuyver a telescope out of previously existing infrastructure, linking up instruments around the world to collect scores of observations, each from a slightly different perspective.