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| The Event Horizon Telescope project provided the first ever image of a black hole and its fiery halo (AFP Photo) |
New York (AFP) - Anonymous to the public just days ago, a US computer scientist named Katie Bouman has become an overnight sensation due to her role in developing a computer algorithm that allowed researchers to take the world's first image of a black hole.
"I'm
so excited that we finally get to share what we have been working on for the
past year!" the 29 year-old Bouman, a postdoctoral researcher at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, gushed on her Facebook account
Wednesday after the image was published.
The term
"black hole" refers to a point in space where matter is so compressed
that it creates a gravity field from which even light cannot escape. The
massive black hole in the photo released Wednesday is 50 million light years
away at the center of a galaxy known as M87.
While the
existence of black holes have been long known, the phenomenon proved impossible
to witness.
In 2016,
Bouman developed an algorithm named CHIRP to sift through a true mountain of
data gathered by the Event Horizon Telescope project from telescopes around the
world to create an image.
The volume
of data -- four petabytes (4 million billion bytes) -- was contained in a
mountain of computer hard drives weighing several hundred pounds that had to be
physically transported to the Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts,
operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
To
guarantee the accuracy of the image, the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics
Center, operated by Harvard University, gave the data to four different teams.
Each team independently used the algorithm to obtain an image.
After a
month of work, the four groups presented their results to the other teams.
"That
was the happiest moment I've ever had [when] I saw all the other teams had
images that were very similar, with the lower half brighter than the top half.
It was amazing to see everyone got that," Bouman told The Wall Street
Journal.
"No
one algorithm or person made this image," wrote Bouman, who in the fall
will begin work as an assistant professor at the California Institute of
Technology (Cal Tech).
"It
required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and
years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods,
and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly
impossible feat," she said on Facebook.
"It
has been truly an honor, and I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to work
with you all."
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