In 2019, astronomers linked eight radio observatories spread across four continents into a single virtual telescope the size of Earth, and after two years of assembling five petabytes of recorded data
Astronomers utilized the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of radio observatories, to capture data on the supermassive black hole in the M87 galaxy. The project required precise synchronization of telescopes across four continents to resolve the black hole's shadow.
Why it matters
This represents a significant milestone in astrophysics, demonstrating the power of international scientific collaboration and advanced data processing.
What does a black hole actually look like? It took a planet-sized telescope and five petabytes of hand-assembled data to find out.
Published September 4, 2026 · How we edit
The Event Horizon Telescope isn’t really one telescope. It’s a case study in what happens when a scientific problem is too big for any single instrument to solve, so a few hundred researchers break it into pieces small enough to actually execute.
No single dish on Earth is large enough to resolve something as distant and compact as a black hole’s shadow. The fix wasn’t inventing a bigger telescope. It was linking eight existing ones, on four continents, so they could function as one telescope roughly the diameter of the planet.
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