The thing is, astronomy research has no inherent profit in it. The work astronomers do can (and often does) eventually have a strong impact on human technology and society but, at the time the scientists are still doing it? Not really.
Astronomy research is not done for profit and frequently involves collaborations which straight up ignore national borders and political matters, focusing on acquiring knowledge and sharing it freely.
Honestly, capitalists hate it.
And yes, astronomy in particular, shares most of the knowledge it finds freely with anyone who wants it.
All major observatories have a freely searchable database. NASA, being publicly funded, have a policy of releasing all their data into the public domain as soon as its received.
Nearly all astronomy researchers put freely accessible copies of their published work on the internet for anyone to see, at https://arxiv.org/archive/astro-ph
The Event Horizon Telescope, incidentally, is a fantastic example of a large scale decentralised non-governmental collaboration.
That black hole image was taken using 8 separately managed radio telescopes scattered across the planet. It was organised by scientists working in 60 different research institutes in 17 countries across 6 continents. With no motive beyond trying to learn something which they didn't know before.
@InvaderXan question, that *looks* like an intentional attempt to triangulate visual data but I don't know if radio telescopes work that way. Is this what was going on or is it simply incidental?
@InvaderXan Thanks for the help!
@Leucrotta
It's incidental. Those just happen to be the places where the telescopes were built. But it's still interesting...
The observation used a technique called very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), which is jargon that means two or more telescopes separated by a large distance. If you want to increase your image resolution, you can either use a larger telescope or use a few smaller ones linked together. The second option works out easier, and the further apart those linked telescopes are, the better the resolution. It's a little like if you were using just one larger one.
So this setup has ridiculously high resolution, because the telescope is effectively almost as big as Earth – Which is how they managed to take a decent image of something 53.5 million light years away!