TIL we imaged a video of a blackhole's event horizon using the Earth's spin

TIL that we exploited the Earth's rotation (along with radio telescopes all around the world linked together) to make a 'virtual' telescope with an 8,000 mile aperture-- the size of our planet. We used that to image the above video of the Messier 87* (a black hole) event horizon 55-million light-years away. The interactive article by Antikythera is awesome, and worth a read: https://planetaryvision.antikythera.org/. It explains how the rotation of the Earth allowed telescopes to see the black hole from different angles, which helped correlate which photons hitting the telescope detectors were signal vs noise.