The resolution of the world-wide network of radio telescopes at that wavelength corresponds to a magnification factor of two millions or the size of a tennis ball in the distance to the moon. This is achieved by observations at shorter radio waves of only 1.3 mm wavelength. In the framework of the EHT project it has become possible to directly image the central black holes in addition to the jets, as demonstrated in the nucleus of Messier 87, as announced on April 10, 2019. This method is used for the investigation of the direct environment of supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei, in particular jets of high-energy particles emitted from the central regions. VLBI enables the highest resolutions in astronomy by coupling a number of radio telescopes distributed across different countries on Earth. The technique applied for the EHT observations is called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). The research department of Michael Kramer at MPIfR contributes to the effort via the „BlackHoleCam“ (BHC) project, founded by the European Research Council (ERC), in collaboration with Heino Falcke (Radboud University Nimwegen, The Netherlands) and Luciano Rezzolla (Frankfurt University, Germany). The EHT project is funded by several agencies and institutions, among those the Max Planck Society through the MPIfR. Present Board Chairman and Project Director are, respectively, Colin J.
Doeleman (Harvard, USA) is the Founding Director.
Anton Zensus from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) is the Board Founding Chairman of the collaboration and Sheperd S. The EHT consortium consists of thirteen stakeholder institutions and about fifty affiliated institutions with about three-hundred individual members in Europe, Asia, Africa and America.
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