How to Make Sense of Data

摘要

In April 2017, a group of observatories scattered across the face of the earth, from Spain to Hawaii, turned their attention to one object: a black hole called M87 that lies around 55 million light-years away. The radio instruments that make up this global network of observatories, known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), gathered data about M87 throughout an entire night of observation; EHT researchers then fed that mountain of information into algorithms that processed it, adjusted for the changing sky and the distances between telescopes, and finally created the historic first image of a black hole.