Katie Bouman, who created the photo of a black hole, became a real star in a day

"I am very happy that we can finally share what we have been working on for a year!" – Bouman, 29, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard and Smithson Astrophysics Center, wrote on his Facebook account Wednesday when the photo was released.

The black hole is an impenetrable cosmic object with such gravity that even light can not escape it. This object is surrounded by a spherical area, in which light or other particles inevitably penetrate into the black hole, called the event horizon, and its size depends on the mbad of the black hole . The black hole itself is invisible, but surrounding materials, such as gases and dusts, can strongly heat up and emit electromagnetic radiation.

A photo released Wednesday shows a supermbadive black hole in the M87 galaxy for 55 million. light years from Earth.

Although the theory of black holes has been developed for a long time, it has not been possible to observe such objects for a long time.

In 2016, Bouman created the CHIRP algorithm, a force to filter huge amounts of data collected by Event Horizon Telescope, which groups together several observatories around the world, and create an image of this material.

The observation equipment, which consists of several petabytes of data, was stored on a large number of computer disks weighing several hundred kilograms in total. All were to be transported to the Heistak Observatory in Westford, Mbadachusetts, a member of the Mbadachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

To ensure the accuracy of the image, the Harvard and Smithson Astrophysical Center, run by Harvard University, provided data to four groups of researchers. Each of them used an algorithm independently to create an image.

After months of work, four groups shared their results.

"It's the happiest moment I've ever had: I saw all the other bands taking very similar pictures, the bottom side of the black hole was brighter than the top side. that everyone had it, "Bouman told the Wall Street Journal.

"This image was not created by a single algorithm or a single man," added Bouman, a professor at Cal Tech University in the fall.

"This has called for a group of scientists from around the world endowed with great talent and many years of hard work to create devices, data processing techniques, image creation, and image processing." ;badysis. All this was necessary to make this feat seemingly impossible, "says the message of the investigator on Facebook.

"It was truly an honor and I was very lucky to have had the chance to work with you," added Bouman.