Meet the woman behind the first-ever image of a black hole

Thursday, 11 April 2019

Katie Bouman played a major role in the creation of the black hole image.

When humanity got its first glimpse of a black hole on Thursday, it was an unforgettable moment for 29-year-old Katie Bouman.

She spearheaded development of a computer algorithm that made the scientific discovery possible.

'Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed,' Bouman wrote in a post on Facebook, alongside a picture of her in front of a laptop showing the black hole.

The image was the culmination of three years of work for Bouman, the BBC reported.

The image of the black hole was revealed during a live-streamed press conference.

* How did scientists capture the black hole image?

* The first image of a black hole has been revealed by scientists**

She had started developing the algorithm while she was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The image was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of eight linked telescopes, before being rendered by Bouman's algorithm, the BBC reported.

'I'm so excited that we finally get to share what we have been working on for the past year,' Bouman wrote in a post on Facebook.

'The image shown today is the combination of images produced by multiple methods. No one algorithm or person made this image, 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.

'It has been truly an honour, and I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you all,' she wrote.

The image, revealed just after 1am on Thursday (NZ time), shows a fiery doughnut-shaped object in a galaxy 53 million light-years from Earth.

'Science fiction has become science fact,' University of Waterloo theoretical physicist Avery Broderick, one of the leaders of the research team of about 200 scientists from 20 countries, declared as the colourised orange-and-black picture was unveiled.

Albert Einstein first theorised about the existence of black holes about 104 years ago.

Supermassive black holes are situated at the center of most galaxies, including ours, and are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. Light gets bent and twisted around by gravity in a bizarre funhouse effect as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust.

The new image confirmed yet another piece of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Einstein even predicted the object's neatly symmetrical shape.

'We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole,' announced Sheperd Doeleman of Harvard, leader of the project.

Jessica Dempsey, another co-discoverer and deputy director of the East Asian Observatory in Hawaii, said the fiery circle reminded her of the flaming Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Three years ago, scientists using an extraordinarily sensitive observing system heard the sound of two much smaller black holes merging to create a gravitational wave, as Einstein predicted. The new image, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and announced around the world, adds light to that sound.

Outside scientists suggested the achievement could be worthy of a Nobel, just like the gravitational wave discovery.

'I think it looks very convincing,' said Andrea Ghez, director of the UCLA Galactic Center Group, who wasn't part of the discovery team.

The picture was made with equipment that detects wavelengths invisible to the human eye, so astronomers added colour to convey the ferocious heat of the gas and dust, glowing at a temperature of perhaps millions of degrees. But if a person were to somehow get close to this black hole, it might not look quite like that, astronomers said.

The black hole is about 6 billion times the mass of our sun and is in a galaxy called M87. Its 'event horizon' - the precipice, or point of no return where light and matter get sucked inexorably into the hole - is as big as our entire solar system.

Black holes are the 'most extreme environment in the known universe,' Broderick said, a violent, churning place of 'gravity run amok.' Unlike smaller black holes, which come from collapsed stars, supermassive black holes are mysterious in origin.

- Stuff and AP