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Updated on April 11, 2019, 14:11
The first image of a black hole is causing a sensation. More than 200 scientists have worked for years to present these images to the public someday. But it was largely thanks to a woman that the project came to fruition.
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On Wednesday, researchers from the Event Horizon Telescope Network (EHT) unveiled the image of a black hole. An international team of more than 200 scientists from 20 countries participated in the project.
The photo is a sensation, because it is extremely difficult, even for the best telescopes, to take usable photos of the phenomenon. The reason: black holes are thousands of light years away and are virtually invisible. Nevertheless, it succeeded.
Katie Bouman, the face behind the sensation
However, this sensation would never have occurred without a woman: one of the main makers of the project is Katie Bouman. This is reported by the television channel "CNN". She developed the crucial algorithm that helped reconstruct images.
Three years ago she was leading the team that had just designed this algorithm for the project. Bouman was then a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Mbadachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
On social networks, she shared a photo Wednesday showing her algorithm for building the first image. "I look with disbelief at the first image of a reconstructed black hole that I have ever achieved."
"She was an integral part of one of our imaging teams," said Vincent Fish, a researcher at Haystack's MIT Observatory, opposite "CNN." Bouman points out that no one would have accomplished this sensation alone. "It worked because a lot of different people worked together and came from many backgrounds."
Several algorithms lead to the same result
The captured specimen is the extremely mbadive black hole located in the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light-years away from the Earth, which corresponds to 6.5 billion times the mbad of our Sun.
In order to be able to identify enough details at this gigantic distance, the researchers compiled eight individual observatories on four continents to form a super-telescope.
However, there were still gaps in the transferred data that had to be filled in order to create a holistic picture. The Bouman algorithm and a few others came into play. The researchers used the data sent by the telescopes and tried to create a picture without gaps using the algorithms.
Several algorithms with different hypotheses have been used, so that researchers can see from different images, that the end result is always the same. Successful. The image that the team has presented to the public is the result of all the algorithms. The different images have been combined.
What can we see in the photo?
But what can we see in the picture when the black holes are fundamentally invisible? The mbad in them is so strongly compressed that nothing escapes their extremely high attraction. Even the light does not penetrate to the outside.
However, before being drawn into a black hole, the material heats up extremely and then shines brightly. This characteristic glow is shown in red on the photo taken now.
With the observations, the researchers hope to answer many basic questions, including: Do the black holes look like the theory?
"To be honest, we were surprised at how much the observed dark spot corresponds to the structure predicted by our computer simulations," said Anton Zensus, director of the Bonn Max Planck Radio Astronomy Institute. (Ff)
Sources used:
- CNN: "This image of a black hole that you have seen everywhere today?
- dpa
Black holes are the ghosts of the universe. It is only by detours that their existence can be proven until now. The researchers have now made an astronomical sensation: they were able to photograph one of these cosmic monsters inside the M87 galaxy.
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