Abstract:
The Event Horizon Telescope has captured the first image of the shadow of a black hole, a result of the processing and interpretation of petabytes of data taken at several locations around the globe. The radio image, taken at a wavelength of 1.3 mm, matches that of lensed photons from relativistic magnetized plasma surrounding a 6.5 billion solar mass black hole at the center of M87. I will discuss the experiment and results, focusing on the challenges in processing, calibrating, and fitting images and models to the massive amounts of data from the heterogeneous EHT array.