LONDON: Sheperd Doeleman’s project to take the first-ever picture of a black hole wasn’t going well.For one thing, his telescope kept filling with snow.
For two weeks at the end of March, Volcan Sierra Negra, an extinct 15,000-foot volcano also known as Tliltepetl that looms over the landscape in southern Mexico, was the nerve center for the largest telescope ever conceived, a network of antennas that reaches from Spain to Hawaii to Chile.
Known as the Event Horizon Telescope, named after the point of no return in a black hole, its job was to see what has been until now unseeable: an exquisitely small, dark circle of nothing, a tiny shadow in the glow of radiation at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. It is there that astronomers think lurks a supermassive black hole, a trap door into which the equivalent of four million suns has evidently disappeared.Nature, Albert Einstein once said, is not malicious, only subtle. But it loves a good fight.
Lightning greeted Dr Doeleman and his crew of astronomers late one night as they crested the summit of their outpost in the unfriendly sky.
