We had telescopes and observers in Hawaii and Chile and Mexico and Spain, and they all had to have good weather at the same time, down to the picosecond. Once this telescope was put together, what did you do? That’s what the Event Horizon Telescope is. Instead, we took eight different telescopes from all around the world that were built for other purposes, and we joined them together to act as one dish. We needed an Earth-sized telescope, and obviously we couldn’t build an Earth-sized telescope dish. The law of diffraction says that if you know the resolution you need to achieve, and the wavelength you are observing at, then you can figure out what your telescope size should be. This GIF compares the pixel size of the most technologically advanced camera on the Hubble Space Telescope with the image of the supermassive black hole in the M87 galaxy. That black hole is so tiny from Earth, it’s about the same as if you were trying to see an orange on the surface of the moon. In order to see a black hole, you need an Earth-sized telescope. What do you mean, getting the instrument together? They hadn’t really gotten into what they were going to do once they got the data. They were interested in getting someone to start working on imaging, because at the time they were still trying to get the instrument together. I hardly knew what a black hole was, but I remember thinking at the end of the meeting that I really wanted to work on this project. I sat in on that meeting for like, two hours, and I understood almost nothing Shep said. , I heard about this meeting, and decided to tag along to hear Shep Doeleman and a couple of other people with the Event Horizon Telescope group. I did my PhD in computer vision at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, working on analyzing images and understanding images. How did you get involved in the Event Horizon Telescope project? The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. On Wednesday after the image was released, Bouman explained to NewsHour how she crafted an algorithm to incorporate it all. Instead, all of the disparate data collected by the planet-sized telescope back in 2017 needed to be processed and translated into an image. “No telescope actually takes a picture,” Bouman told the PBS NewsHour in an interview. Political figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have encouraged Bouman to “ take your rightful seat in history.”īut what exactly did the 29-year-old Bouman do to capture an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, located 55 million light years away? Although she was not the only woman to work on this image (more than 200 scientists around the world contributed to the project), she has become a symbol for women’s achievement in computer science and astronomy. The Event Horizon Telescope released the image on Wednesday, and since then Bouman has been swamped with phone calls, text messages and emails. Imaging scientist Katie Bouman helped construct the first ever photo of a black hole, but she didn’t expect this kind of excitement - or attention.
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