RC Logr 20190411 071927

Thursday, 11 Apr, 2019

The first black hole “photo” is incredible, and before her credit gets sucked into said black hole, it was Dr. Katie Bouman came up with the clever computer algorithm to capture it. She explains how, from the TED stage. (Say it in @GuyRaz’s voice) What an inspiration to young women considering a career in STEM! 👭

A couple of technical tidbits:

• the black hole is so far away, 53 million light years, that it required use of the planet-sized EHT or Event Horizon Telescope. The EHT is 8 observatories across the globe, using interferometry to combine the data.
• there was petabytes worth of data, and it had to be ferried around via essentially “sneakernet”, since some of the locations don’t have good Internet connections and there was simply too much data to send via wire.
• Dr. Bouman herself has said it was a team effort, and indeed it was a team of 200 astronomers world wide.
• Scientists on the team estimate the mass to be 6.5 billion times as massive as our sun.

Read about it here from MIT news office.