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<\/div>We are living in the era of black hole<\/a> photography. In 2019, the first picture taken<\/a> of a black hole was released. Unsurprisingly, it was difficult to get \u2013 in fact, it required a telescope essentially the size of Earth<\/a>. Yet for researchers such as Alex Lupsasca at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, that wasn\u2019t good enough. He and his colleagues have set their sights on a more detailed image, but to get it we will need an even larger telescope.<\/p>\n The groundbreaking 2019 picture was taken by a network of radio observatories dotted around Earth, collectively known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Working together, eight of them created an image as clear as would a single dish larger than any that could actually be built. Lupsasca is part of a team planning to launch the Black Hole Explorer (BHEX) telescope, which would extend this network into space 20,000 kilometres from Earth \u2013 creating a receiver effectively bigger than the planet. Doing so, he says, would give researchers the precision needed to measure a mysterious part of a black hole known as a photon ring, in this case one created by M87*, the supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy that featured in that first picture.<\/p>\n