MIT Post Doc Creates the Algorithm to Display the Black Hole

This week, the world laid eyes on an image that previously it was thought was unseeable. The first visualization of a black hole looks set to revolutionize our understanding of one of the great mysteries of the universe. And the woman whose crucial algorithm helped make it possible, Katie Bouman, is just 29 years old. The data used to piece together the image was captured by the Event Horizon telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile. Bouman’s role, when she joined the team working on the project six years ago as a 23-year-old junior researcher, was to help build an algorithm which could construct the masses of astronomical data collected by the telescope into a single coherent image.

The data used to piece together the image was captured by the Event Horizon telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile. Bouman’s role, when she joined the team working on the project six years ago as a 23-year-old junior researcher, was to help build an algorithm which could construct the masses of astronomical data collected by the telescope into a single coherent image. Though her background was in computer science and electrical engineering, not astrophysics, Bouman and her team worked for three years building the imaging code. Once the algorithm had been built, Bouman worked with dozens of EHT researchers for a further two years developing and testing how the imaging of the black hole could be designed.



Credits:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/11/katie-bouman-black-hole-photo