The woman who will go down in history as the first to capture the image of a black hole

Katie Bouman is 29 years old and is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology. Along with a team of 200 scientists from around the world, she managed to capture the first image of a black hole. The young woman became famous on April 10 thanks to her algorithm that, along with other lines of code, managed to reconstruct an image that for years seemed impossible to achieve.

O awesome.club researched some details about the story of this young woman who made the news in recent days and who achieved something that no one had ever achieved.

Katie specializes in Computer Science and led the development of a computer program that allowed the capture of the image of the black hole. She used the algorithms and assembled the image with 350 terabytes of data. “Watching in almost disbelief as the first image I created of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed,” Katie said on Facebook.

The CHIRP algorithm — Continuous High-Resolution Image Reconstruction (Continuous Reconstruction of High Resolution Images)developed by Katie, not only served to obtain the image, but also to filter out the noise caused by atmospheric humidity, which distorts radio waves and synchronizes signals captured by telescopes.

Katie developed the algorithm in approx. 3 years🇧🇷 She began while still a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she led the project with assistance from a team at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the Observatory. Haystack, all linked to MIT.

A black hole is one of the great mysteries of science and has been defined by NASA as “the result of space-time deformation, caused after the gravitational collapse of a massive star, from which nothing, not even light, can escape”.

primordial black holes: they are as small as atoms and scientists believe they formed a long time ago, after the Big Bang. stellar black holes: like primordials, they form when the center of a massive star collapses. supermassive black holes: (pictured recently): They formed at the same time as the galaxy they are in. Its size is related to the size and mass of the galaxy it is in.

From left to right: Albert Einstein, Hideki Yukawa and John Archibald Wheeler.

In 1967, physicist John Archibald Wheeler invented the term ‘black hole’ – which refers to stars with black bodies that exist in Space and where gravity is so strong that such stars are not able to reflect light.

Although black holes are not visible to the eye, astronomers have for years developed space tools capable of seeing them and recognizing their behavior. Therefore, April 10, 2019 will go down in history as one of the most important moments for science, because, for the first time, it was possible to obtain a picture of a black hole.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a project whose objective is to form a global network of radio telescopes with data from different parts of the world in order to observe a massive black hole. The EHT has more than 200 associated scientists from Mexico, Chile, United States, France, Greenland and Spain.

The historic moment when 8 observatories in different parts of the world recorded the photo. What we see in the image is a ring with one part brighter than the other, located more than 500 million billion kilometers from Earth.

Of the historic moment, the 29-year-old said: “None of us could have done this alone. This was possible thanks to the help of people from different backgrounds.”

What do you think of the incredible feat? Leave your opinion in the comments.