Shanghai telescope honored for black hole assistance

A radio telescope in Shanghai that has made significant contributions to astronomy for nearly a decade and participated in long-term observations used to confirm data in the first image of a black hole in deep space, won the top prize at the 2018 Shanghai Science and Technology Awards.

Shanghai telescope honored for black hole assistanceAt 65 meters in diameter, the radio telescope Tianma-or heavenly horse-located in the suburban Songjiang district, is the largest omnibearing movable telescope in Asia and is ranked third in the world in comprehensive performance. It began providing celestial observations in 2012.

While Tianma was not directly involved in the observations that led to the black hole image, its ability to see other phenomena in the universe on certain wavelengths, contributed to the precise calibration of the final data for the image, scientists in Shanghai said.

Tianma is part of the East Asia Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network, or EAVN.

Shen Zhiqiang, head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and a member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) international team that assembled the black hole image.

More than 200 astronomers worldwide linked via a globe-spanning array of eight ground-based radio telescopes-said that the equipment capturing the signals that were eventually translated into the image detected wavelengths of 1.3 millimeters, and there was no corresponding equipment in China.

But Tianma, part of EAVN, together with telescopes in the Republic of Korea and Japan, had been making observations at wavelengths of 7 and 13 millimeters for a long time, Shen said.

“EHT could capture the image without assistance of the network but the supporting observations provided supplemental information and showed consistency with the EHT observations to better verify their accuracy,” Shen said.

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