Black Hole Photo: Data storage tech helps craft image of where light can't escape

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Black holes have long held our fascination and the groundbreaking, first-ever photograph of a black hole released in April has aroused interest even more. But how was this particular image created in areas where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape? CGTN's Hendrik Sybrandy explains.

Inside this ordinary building in Colorado, a company called Conduant builds recording devices with extraordinary capabilities.

ALEX SAMMOURY CONDUANT CORPORATION "Each one of these drive modules can hold up to 80 terabytes of data."

These storage systems record data at high speeds and in large quantities, benefiting a range of customers, including astronomers.

PHIL BRUNELLE CONDUANT CO-FOUNDER "The quantities of data that the radio astronomy community gather are astronomical. So to speak."

Now the small manufacturer Phil Brunelle co-founded more than two decades ago is a part of history.

SHEP DOELEMAN HARVARD-SMITHSONIAN CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS "We're delighted to be able to report to you today that we have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole."

In April, the National Science Foundation revealed the never-before-seen image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the M-87 galaxy 55 billion light -years away from Earth.

HENDRIK SYBRANDY DENVER "As impressive as the photograph was the way the Event Horizon Telescope, as it was called, created it. It was the culmination of a ten-year-project."

A global network of eight telescopes combined to form a virtual telescope the size of Earth which, over four nights in 2017, recorded the radio waves from in and around the black hole. That data, captured on these hard drives, was assembled by a supercomputer into a final image.

PHIL BRUNELLE CONDUANT CO-FOUNDER "Oh we were excited about that. There was a beautiful picture that came out with one of the scientists with her arms around our storage units. That made it really clear that we were involved."

That scientist says the small number of telescopes posed a challenge to her and her colleagues.

KATIE BOUMAN BLACK HOLE RESEARCHER "That means there's gaps of missing information and so we had to come up with techniques to intelligently fill in those gaps."

Astronomers say the circular shadow of the black hole, visible for the first time, confirms Albert Einstein's now century-old general theory of relativity.

SHEP DOELEMAN HARVARD-SMITHSONIAN CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS "We now know clearly that black holes drive large scale structure in the universe and we now have an entirely new way of studying general relativity that we never had before. And as with all great discoveries, this is just the beginning."

A discovery these storage systems with their speed and capacity made possible.

PHIL BRUNELLE CONDUANT CO-FOUNDER "Oh it feels great, it's a huge event all right, it's big. I've always said there's a world of data out there ready to be digitized and recorded and processed and this is just one of those events."

And this is a photograph scientists will be talking about and trying to improve upon for years to come. Hendrik Sybrandy, CGTN, Denver.