Graduate student made it possible to witness Black Hole image

Graduate student made it possible to witness Black Hole image

Guwahati: An international team of more than 200 researchers unveiled the first-ever image of a black hole on Wednesday despite the tall order and the effort wouldn't have been possible without Katie Bouman who developed a crucial algorithm that helped devise imaging methods.

Bouman led the creation of an algorithm three years ago that has eventually helped capture the first of its kind image- a super massive black hole and its shadow at the center of a galaxy known as M87. Bouman was a graduate student three years ago in computer science and artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It is not an easy task to take photo of black holes as it is extremely far away and compact and by definition it is supposed to be invisible although they can give off a shadow when they interact with the material around them.

Her algorithm helped to fill in the gaps and her algorithm along with several others came in. Using imaging algorithms like Bouman's researchers created three scripted code pipelines to piece together the picture.

Researchers took the sparse and noisy data that the telescopes spit out and tried to make an image. Bouman directed the verification of images and selection of imaging parameters for the past five years. According to reports published she told that she had developed ways to generate synthetic data and used different algorithms and tested blindly to see if they can recover an image.

She further said that she didn't want to just develop one algorithm and wants to develop many different algorithms that all have different assumptions built into them. She said that if all of them recover the same general structure then that builds the confidence.

She also stated that, "No matter what we did, you would have to bend over backwards crazy to get something that wasn't this ring."

Bouman made significant contributions to the project who is a junior member. Although the senior scientists worked on the project but the imaging portion was mostly led by junior researchers such as graduate students and postdocs.

Bouman further said that no one could have done this alone.

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Sentinel Assam
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