Here is a bit more information on how this telescope came to be:

Dr. Doeleman traced his interest in quasars and black holes to the moment he first saw images like that. “Whatever is powering those jets has to be insanely powerful,” he said.

In 2008, Dr. Doeleman had what he calls an “a-ha moment” when he and colleagues yoked together three radio telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona and California into a interferometer system and trained it on the galactic center, using a shorter wavelength. They detected a small blob of energy, “a dot that would not go away.”

They were seeing something through the frosted glass. But what?

Since then, he and his colleagues have devoted their energies to building a network big enough to see whether that radio dot harbors signs of a black hole.

We can’t wait to see more from their discoveries and find out even more about the phenomenon of black holes!

thanks to The New York Times for the great write-up