Katie Bouman 'didn't know anything about' black holes—then she helped capture the first photo of one via CNBCMakeIt
On Wednesday, after 10 years of planning and scientific investments totaling over $50 million, researchers released the first-ever image of a black hole. The image is a feat of modern science — experts say it's the equivalent of taking a photo of an orange on the moon with a smartphone — and international collaboration. Over 200 scientists across the globe contributed to the project.
But when she became involved in the project almost six years ago, she had no experience studying black holes. "So incredibly excited for Dr. Katie Bouman and her work to get the first picture of a black hole that was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope and rendered by HER algorithm," tweeted Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Girls Who Code.
"The black hole is really, really far away from us. The one we showed a picture of is 55 million light years away. That means that image is what the black hole was like 55 million years ago," explains Bouman."The law of diffraction tells us that given the wavelength that we need in order to see that event horizon, which is about one millimeter, and the resolution we need to see a ring of that size, we would need to build an earth-sized telescope.
"The team collected about five petabytes of data, and one petabytes is a thousand terabytes," explains Bouman."Your typical computer has maybe one terabyte or so. So that would be like 5,000 typical laptops of data. It's just a huge. I mean, we basically had to freeze light onto these hard drives."According to MIT, Bouman led one of four teams responsible for turning this mind-numbing amount of data into one verifiable image.
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