Black hole photo turns US scientist Katie Bouman, 29, into overnight star
- The computer scientist developed an algorithm named CHIRP that allowed researchers to take the world’s first image of the phenomenon
- The volume of data to be sorted – four petabytes (4 million billion bytes) – was contained in a mountain of computer hard drives
Anonymous to the public just days ago, a 29-year-old American computer scientist has become an overnight sensation because of her role in developing a computer algorithm that allowed researchers to take the world’s first image of a black hole.
“I’m so excited that we finally get to share what we have been working on for the past year!” Katie Bouman, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, wrote on her Facebook account on Wednesday after the image was published.
The term “black hole” refers to a point in space where matter is so compressed that it creates a gravity field from which even light cannot escape.
The massive black hole in the photo released Wednesday is 50 million light years away at the centre of a galaxy known as M87.
While the existence of black holes have been long known, the phenomenon proved impossible to witness.
In 2016, Bouman developed an algorithm named CHIRP to sift through a true mountain of data gathered by the Event Horizon Telescope project from telescopes around the world to create an image.
