The way VLBI works is, we have to freeze the light, capture it, record it perfectly faithfully on the recording system, then shift the data back to a central supercomputer, which compares the light from California and Hawaii and the other locations, and synthesizes it.

'In a typical telescope, light bounces off a precisely curved surface and all the light gets focused into a focal plane. 'If you have telescopes around the world you can make a virtual Earth-sized telescope,' said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at MIT's Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts who's leading the Event Horizon Telescope project. In VLBI, a supercomputer acts as a giant telescope lens, in effect. To accomplish such fine resolution, the project takes advantage of a technique called very long baseline interferometry (VLBI).