Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know

"No telescope actually takes a picture. What happens is, the light from the black hole travels 55 million light years and then every dish collects a single stream of the light that it sees at the same time. That’s recorded onto these hard drives. We can’t send that data over the internet because it’s way too big — [the hard drives are] sent on airplanes to a central location, where they’re computationally processed. But it’s incomplete. The process of imaging is taking the incomplete information that we get from a couple of places on our virtual telescope, and trying to fill in all the missing information to get the picture an actual Earth-sized telescope would have produced. That is a hard problem."

This incredible collaboration between Sasha Haco, Stephen Hawking, Malcolm Perry, and Andrew Strominger, resulted in a paper summarizing the status of their long-term project on large diffeomorphisms, soft hair, and the quantum structure of black holes through the end of their time together. Read this paper here.

"In the development of major technical collaborations, it is rare indeed for scientists, philosophers, historians, ethnographers, art historians, and sociologists to have the chance to think together about scientific knowledge as it unfolds. Here we have that possibility, not after the fact, but now, in the course of building instruments, observations, theories, and interpretations of black holes. We are shaping the start of this joint venture; its future to be built and written."

- Peter Galison