Event Horizon Telescope Snags New Funding to Capture 1st Movie of a Black Hole

By Meghan Bartels 6 hours ago

This spring, scientists released the first-ever image of a black hole — but what they really want is to create a movie of a black hole.

For that, the team will need to involve more instruments in the project, and the Event Horizon Telescope just got money to start making that happen. The grant of $12.7 million comes from the National Science Foundation, which is a long-term funding source for the black hole imagery project.

"The spectacular … results have surpassed our wildest expectations, and I am deeply proud of what we achieved as a team," Shep Doeleman, the founding director of the Event Horizon Telescope and an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement. "Now the question one hears the most is, 'What's next?'"

The answer is a moving image of a black hole, rather than a static snapshot. That type of data will be particularly beneficial when it comes to understanding a crowd-favorite supermassive black hole, the one at the center of the galaxy we live in.

More:
https://www.space.com/event-horizon-telescope-black-hole-movie-funded.html