REVOLUTIONIZING SCIENCE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

A VIRTUAL EARTH-SIZED TELESCOPE COLLABORATION

The ngEHT Collaboration  Pushing the Boundaries of Science and Collaboration

In 2019, the world was stunned by the first-ever image of a black hole produced by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration. Now, the next generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) collaboration is taking it a step further by aiming to create high-quality videos of black holes. But this collaboration is groundbreaking in more ways than one, as it brings together experts from natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to push the boundaries of science and collaboration.

Virtual Earth-Sized Telescope

To produce black hole images and videos, a telescope almost the size of Earth itself is required. This is where the ngEHT collaboration comes in, using many telescopes and telescope arrays scattered across the globe to form a single, virtual Earth-sized telescope through very long baseline interferometry. With new telescopes at new sites being built to better fill in the gaps of the broken mirror, the collaboration is currently in the process of selecting optimal places across the world to increase the number of sites to approximately 20.

Collaboration Challenges

Collaborating with over 300 experts across different disciplines is not an easy feat. The history, philosophy, and culture working group has just published a landmark report outlining how humanities and social science scholars can work with astrophysicists and engineers from the first stages of a project. The report has four focus areas: collaborative knowledge formation, philosophical foundations, algorithms and visualization, and responsible telescope siting.

Collaborative Knowledge Formation

One of the challenges of collaboration is determining what will be included in a paper or project. It's important to balance collaborative approaches and structure everyone's involvement in a way that promotes consensus but also allows people to express dissent. Diversity of beliefs and practices among collaboration members can be beneficial to science.

Philosophical Foundations

Philosophy plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between formal mathematical theory and the messy world of experiments where idealized assumptions often do not hold up. Philosophers can help investigate the underlying assumptions physicists might have about a phenomenon and consider epistemic risks.

Algorithms and Visualization

The aesthetic choices regarding the final black hole images and videos take place in a broader context of visual culture. Choices must be made to communicate scientific findings to wider audiences, such as choosing an orange-red color palette to communicate the heat of the glowing material around the black hole in the image of Sagittarius A*.

Responsible Telescope Siting

The choice of locations for telescopes, or telescope siting, has historically been determined by technical and economic considerations. The ngEHT collaboration aims to advance responsible siting practices and draw together experts in philosophy, history, sociology, community advocacy, science, and engineering to contribute to the decision-making process in ways that include cultural, social, and environmental factors.

Changing Science in the 21st Century

The ngEHT collaboration is an exciting example of how ambitious plans demand innovative approaches and how sciences are evolving in the 21st century. It highlights the importance of collaboration across different disciplines, as well as the need for responsible and ethical considerations in scientific endeavors.

The ngEHT collaboration is not only pushing the boundaries of science but also changing the way we think about collaboration. It serves as a model for future collaborations, where diverse perspectives and expertise can come together to tackle complex scientific challenges. The ngEHT collaboration's groundbreaking work on black holes will undoubtedly continue to inspire new breakthroughs and push the limits of our understanding of the universe.

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