On Wednesday, astronomers announced that they’d captured the world’s first image of a black hole — and the internet couldn’t handle it.
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.”
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.
Over seven days in April 2017, the EHT experiment turned all eight telescopes toward M87.
There’s no internet that can compete with 5 petabytes of data on a plane.”.
The ALMA observatory in Chile was one of the eight telescopes that imaged the M87 black hole.
Ironically, Chan’s team used these powerful GPUs to simulate so many black holes in advance of the M87 observation, they already knew what to expect from the real black hole. »
