European Space Agency Eight Synchronized Telescopes The ALMA observatory in Chile was one of the eight telescopes that imaged the M87 black hole. Here’s why and how this one picture required the data equivalent of 1.39 billion copies of “ Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X. Five petabytes is a lot of data: It’s equivalent to 5,000 years of MP3 files.” “It amounts to more than half a ton of hard drives. “We had 5 petabytes of data recorded,” Dan Marrone, Ph.D., an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona who specialized in data storage for the EHT experiment, told reporters on Wednesday. "There’s no internet that can compete with 5 petabytes of data on a plane." Synchronized by custom-made atomic clocks, they all started collecting the incoming radio signals from the distant black hole and logging the data on super-fast data recorders that had been built for this very task. Over seven days in April 2017, the EHT experiment turned all eight telescopes toward M87. So in addition to being a massive achievement of human ingenuity and understanding, one that confirmed several theories about black holes, the M87 black hole image was also a Herculean feat of data storage and management. Instead, the massive quantity of data collected by the radio antennae had to be flown on airplanes to central data centers where it could be cleaned and analyzed. ![]() No, we’re not talking about black hole Shrek memes or snarky opinion pieces about how this image of an object 55 million light-years away was “so blurry.” We’re talking about how the internet literally couldn’t handle the quantity of data collected by the eight telescopes across five continents that make up the Event Horizon Telescope experiment that captured this image of the black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87. On Wednesday, astronomers announced that they’d captured the world’s first image of a black hole - and the internet couldn’t handle it.
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