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This Thursday, the whole world saw the very first spectacular image of the luminous halo surrounding a black hole. The wacky image (pun intended) of an entity 500 million billion kilometers from Earth could only be achieved through advanced computer-aided reconstruction, requiring an algorithm unprecedented and complex. But it was a man-made conversion by an ingeniously crafted computer program that allowed humanity to consider what would otherwise have been an incomprehensible confusion of gigantic data. The image captured the popular imagination of millions of people and found a precedent of spectacle in the famous "Earthrise". This inspiring, invigorating and humiliating image puts us in perspective and demonstrates the curiosity, the prowess and the perseverance of the efforts that characterize our civilization.
Black holes are superdense cosmic objects, which are the culmination of a massive stellar matter that collapses in itself, due to its own super-intense gravitation. Subsequently, its gravitation is so powerful that beyond its imaginary border, nothing, not even light or radiation, the fastest entity in the universe, can escape, making them notoriously difficult to detect. The one on the picture was typical, supermassive, whose size rivals that of our solar system.
In order to coordinate and assemble the seemingly inconsistent set of distinct memories,
avante –keep Computer techniques developed by specialized computer scientists were used.
A telescope could never, qualitatively, be enough to capture this elusive object, incredibly distant and obscure. As a result, the light emanating from this unfathomable and distant source was captured by a multitude of (8 more precisely) telescopes equipped with interferometry, which extended from the globe and, in essence, transformed the entire planet into one. giant lens, each individual telescope acting as facets of this "compound eye". However, this offshoring, along with proper supervision, ensured by analogy an "ocular lobe of the brain" to make sense of this sparse, diffuse and random mass of data, similar to the way our brains process the raw images that arrive at our eyes. In order to coordinate and assemble this seemingly incoherent set of distinct memories, cutting-edge computing techniques, designed by specialized computer scientists, were used.
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The data they captured was stored on hundreds of hard drives routed to central processing centers in Boston, USA, and Bonn, Germany.
Said image, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) – a network of eight telescopes connected remotely – was rendered by a new algorithm, developed by a dedicated team unilaterally composed of astrophysicists, mathematicians and software developers at the cutting edge of technology. The fervent ardor lasted for some years.
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
"Looking in disbelief at the first image of a black hole I made was being rebuilt," she wrote in the caption of the Facebook publication of the photo.
She started making the algorithm three years ago when she was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She also presented a lucid EPD presentation on black holes in imaging (rendering) in April 2017.
"We are a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers, and that's what it took to achieve something that was thought impossible," Dr. Bouman was quoted by the BBC after the publication of the image.
Several eminent scientists, including Nobel laureates RK Pachauri and Sir Tim Hunt, have testified in various ways to misogyny in scientific institutions, universities and research institutions.
Parallels of this voluminous computer tour de force have often been associated with another seemingly insurmountable feat, namely to code the ambitious trajectory of the Apollo-11 mission (whose successful execution is described as analogous to typing on paper thickness). ), which landed the first human on the moon, a task itself considered naive, reckless and even daring-diabolical, by most contemporaries. The quantum leap for humanity has been implemented thanks to the isolated efforts of pioneering software engineer Margaret Hamilton, also a computer scientist at MIT. She is photographed standing next to her stack of code above, left.
The abject disparity between men and women in STEM has long been the subject of a general negligence on the part of the media and on the part of the administration, a lack of knowledge limiting indifference and apathy, even in the First World, and has often been the subject of many spontaneous attempts to be systematically misinterpreted. intrinsic lack of scientific skills in women and accidentally explained. However, there is no biological basis for privileging a specific form of analytical skill in gender dimorphism, as such. Nevertheless, the aforementioned fashion is quite widespread, even in the first world countries.
Several prominent scientists, including Nobel laureates RK Pachauri and Sir Tim Hunt, have testified in various ways against the misogyny of scientific institutions, academic institutions and research institutions, ranging from sexism daily casual and flagrant to the banal and alarming sexual violence and harassment. .
Read also: Charusita Chakravarty: The chemist who fought sexism in STEM | #IndianWomenInHistory
An overwhelming response from media women around the world has emerged in response to this feat: it has been inspired, pushed, reinforced and encouraged by the pioneering woman behind the most wonderful discovery product of this century.
Source of the selected image: ign
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