The Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founding sponsors (Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Ma Huateng, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki) announced on September 5th that the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration will receive the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The $3 million prize will be split equally among 347 awardees, of which 53 are working or worked for the GLT (the Greenland Telescope) of ASIAA. This signifies a major role that Taiwan has played in the achievement.

This year’s Breakthrough Prize recognizes the EHT laureates for capturing the first image of a black hole. The jury has found remarkable the achievements by combining the data from different telescopes after synchronizing them with atomic clocks, thereby producing a virtual telescope as large as the Earth, to obtain unprecedented resolution. The image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy was obtained after painstakingly analyzing the data with novel algorithms and techniques, and reveals a bright ring marking the point where matter orbits the black hole, surrounding a dark region where light cannot escape the black hole’s gravitational pull. The black hole shadow matched the expectations of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity.

Academician Paul Ho, Director of East Asian Observatory, who led the ASIAA efforts in this experiment, says, “In the development of ASIAA we strategically chose to focus on Radio Astronomy and interferometric techniques, in order to achieve very high angular resolution. The developments were difficult, full of challenges, yet the chance of achieving frontier science breakthrough is good. Now we have seen the unseeable. It is a wonderful reward for Taiwanese science. The ASIAA has been partners on the SMA, ALMA, and JCMT, three of the eight facilities of the EHT. We have also deployed the GLT which has already taken data for the next experiment.”

Participating in ASIAA’s almost all radio telescope plans in the past 20 years, ASIAA Research Fellow Dr. Ming-Tang Chen, GLT Project Manager, says, “Working with such a great team is as much an honor as receiving the prestigious award.. “

ASIAA Associate Research Fellow Keiichi Asada, GLT Project Scientist, says “We finally arrived the origin of the questions. It has passed around 100 years after the discovery of relativistic jet in 1918, which now we consider as the indirect evidence of the existence of SMBH at the center of this galaxy.”

Thanks to the addition of the Greenland Telescope and the advances in observation instruments, ASIAA Chief Scientist in Hawaii, Geoffrey Bower says, “This is only the beginning. We plan to use the GLT and the EHT to make even better images of black holes, which will allow us to make even stronger tests of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.”

ASIAA awardees and the first image of a black hole. Credit: ASIAA / Lauren Huang / EHT Collaboration.

Background information – The EHT Collaboration
The EHT collaboration involves more than 200 researchers from Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America. The international collaboration is working to capture the first-ever image of a black hole by creating a virtual Earth-sized telescope. Supported by considerable international investment, the EHT links existing telescopes using novel systems — creating a fundamentally new instrument with the highest angular resolving power that has yet been achieved.

The individual telescopes involved in the EHT collaboration are at present: ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter Telescope, the IRAM NOEMA Observatory (since 2018), the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT), the Submillimeter Array (SMA), the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT), the South Pole Telescope (SPT) and the Greenland Telescope (GLT, since 2018).

The EHT consortium consists of 13 stakeholder institutes; the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the University of Arizona, the University of Chicago, the East Asian Observatory, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique, Large Millimeter Telescope, Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, MIT Haystack Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Radboud University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Background information – the Breakthrough Prize
For the eighth year and renown as the “Oscars of Science,” the Breakthrough Prize will recognize the world’s top scientists. Each prize is $3 million and presented in the fields of Life Sciences (up to four per year), Fundamental Physics (one per year) and Mathematics (one per year). In addition, up to three New Horizons in Physics and up to three New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes are given out to junior researchers each year. Laureates attend a live televised award ceremony designed to celebrate their achievements and inspire the next generation of scientists. As part of the ceremony schedule, they also engage in a program of lectures and discussions.

The Breakthrough Prizes are sponsored by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Ma Huateng, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. Selection Committees composed of previous Breakthrough Prize laureates in each field choose the winners. Information on Breakthrough Prize is available at breakthroughprize.org.

Links:
Breakthrough Prize 2020 Official Announcement:
https://breakthroughprize.org/News/54

Publications reporting the first image of a black hole, April 10th, 2019:
https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_EHT

Event Horizon Telescope (EHT):
http://www.eventhorizontelescope.org/