How to hunt for a black hole with a telescope the size of Earth

Here's how to catch a black hole. First, spend many years enlisting eight of the top radio observatories across four continents to join forces for an unprecedented hunt. Next, coordinate plans so that those observatories will simultaneously turn their attention to the same patches of sky for several days. Then, collect observations at a scale never before attempted in science — generating 2 petabytes of data each night.

This is the audacious plan for next month’s trial of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a team-up of radio telescopes stationed across the globe to create a virtual observatory nearly as big as Earth. And researchers hope that when they sift through the mountain of data, they will capture the first details ever recorded of the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, as well as pictures of a much larger one in the more distant galaxy M87.