Meet Katie Bouman, One Woman Who Helped Make the World ’s First Image of a Black Hole

The space was tiny and hot. On a fateful day last summer, Katie Bouman and three fellow researchers filed into a small room at Harvard University, safe from prying eyes, in order to see an image that had been years in the making. Researchers from all over the world had combined forces to gather masses of astronomical data — enough to fill a half ton of hard drives — that they hoped to turn into the world’s first image of a black hole. In order to do that, the team needed algorithms that could distill all that noisy, messy information into one comprehensible picture. And Bouman, whose expertise is not in astrophysics but computer science, was one of a small group of people who spent years developing and testing those methods. On that day in June, the data had finally arrived and Bouman’s team pressed “go,” waiting to see whether the code they had written could actually capture the invisible. “We all watched as the images appeared on our computers,” Bouman says. “The ring came so easily. It was unbelievable.” The world saw that ring — a swirl of light and substance revealing the shadow of an unseeable mass — on Wednesday, when a team of more than 200 researchers presented a picture of the black hole lying at the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy. Among other things, the announcement marked the moment when people like Bouman could finally share their secret work with the world. “It’s been r...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime space Source Type: news