Mexicans and Tec alumni among the winners for photograph of black hole

Tec alumnus Sandra Bustamante formed part of the international team that took the historic picture and has been awarded the Breakthrough Prize

By National News Desk - 09/09/2019

Sandra Bustamente González, a North Sonora campus graduate, forms part of the team of scientists who received the Breakthrough Prize (considered the Oscars of science) for the historic picture of a black hole.

8 Mexicans, including Sandra, participated in the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, a collaboration involving a total of 347 scientists across the world.

We’re pleased to announce that the @ehtelescope collaboration has won the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Congratulations to the entire team, across 60 institutions and 20 countries. https://t.co/LzL5M8SmEp https://t.co/k2Am4snPnN
— Breakthrough (@brkthroughprize) September 5, 2019

The Prize website explains that they were able to synchronize 8 telescopes around the world using a network of atomic clocks to create a kind of virtual telescope as large as the Earth that recorded the black hole with a resolving power never before achieved.

“The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun,” it says.

Sandra’s task was to monitor the light receivers in the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) Alfonso Serrano, located in the state of Puebla.

“My life goal was to be able to contribute to the creation of new technologies that could help the scientific community, so being part of the EHT is like a dream come true,” said Sandra to CONECTA last April, when the picture was published.

The project won in the Fundamental Physics category. These are the other Mexican scientists in the group who were recognized by this prize:

David Hughes, Director of the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) Alfonso Serrano.
David Gale, National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics, and Electronics (INAOE) researcher.
Edgar Castillo Domínguez, Arturo Gómez Ruiz, David Sánchez Argüelles, and Alfredo Montaña Barbano, CONACyT professors.
Milagros Zeballos, INAOE alumnus.

The Breakthrough Prize ceremony will be held on November 3, and will be broadcast live by National Geographic.

With information from Dulce Pontaza, of TecReview

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