Scientist Katherine Bouman has become one of the world’s most popular people after helping create the first ever picture of a .
The researcher was one of a team made up of a huge number of experts who helped create the image, which shows the blazing red and yellow of the that surrounds the first black hole ever to be seen.
And one image in particular of Bouman doing part of that work — using an algorithm she wrote to generate the image that made headlines around the world — has served as a reminder of the vast amount of expertise that has gone into creating such an achievement.
The picture she posted to showed her sitting in front of a computer as the famous photograph was assembled. “Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed,” she wrote alongside the picture.
Despite her role in taking the picture, Bouman is not actually an astronomer. Instead, her expertise is in computer algorithms, and the work she did was to help turn the data received by astronomers into a useful picture, rather than collecting that data in the first place.
The now famous picture of the black hole was generated by scientists who turned a series of dishes around the world to point together deep into space, creating one huge virtual telescope. All of the vast amount of data that process produced then had to be sorted through to understand what exactly it showed — and it was an algorithm written by Bouman that helped turn that messy data into something visible.
Her work began three years ago, when she was a graduate student at the . She led the project alongside a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the MIT .
The breakthrough led to her being hailed on social media, and her name was quickly trending. She received callouts from celebrities including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who tweeted about her achievement. “Take your rightful seat in history, Dr Bouman!” she wrote.
Bouman said the work that allowed the image to be created was the result of co-operation between a host of researchers. “No one of us could’ve done it alone,” Bouman told CNN.