Katie Bouman: Without this woman, there would be no photo of the black hole

As the image built on her laptop, Katie Bouman clasped her crossed hands over her mouth for joy. The first photo of a black hole - and she had helped to do it. Bouman's work of the past few years had paid off, her algorithm worked.

Eight radio telescopes on four continents were needed to create a picture of the black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy. If a human eye were as powerful as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), anyone could read a newspaper across the Atlantic. The problem: The data collected was immense and filled several hard drives. It would have been unthinkable to send them online.

EHT Collaboration

Thanks to Bouman's algorithm, the researchers were able to calculate the image of the black hole

From all this information, those who made a coherent picture of the black hole had to be filtered out. And that was exactly what the PhD computer scientist Bouman was doing. The 29-year-old headed the development of an algorithm at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that was able to compile the data from the telescopes.

"I did not even tell my family about it"

Already last summer, the system spat out a first image of the carnivore, which is about 55 million light-years away from Earth. Bouman had then entrenched himself with three other researchers in a small room at Harvard University, so that no one got to see the picture. "It was really hard to shut up," Bouman told Time magazine. "I did not even tell my family about it."

This photo shows the moment when Bouman realizes that the system works:

In social networks, she is celebrated as the woman behind the historical picture. She gives herself more modestly: "No single algorithm or person alone has made the picture, it took the incredible talent of a team of scientists from around the world and years of hard work," Bouman writes on Facebook.

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In fact, the research team consisted of more than 200 scientists, including women, but the men were clearly in the majority. Bouman is therefore considered a prime example of what women can afford in science, which is still a male domain. Even in Germany, the proportion of women in research is only about 30 percent. Studies also show that women scientists are cited much less frequently than their male counterparts.

MIT also points to the scientific achievements of women. A tweet on the left shows Bouman with the disks full of data on the black hole. On the right is Margaret Hamilton, whose software made manned space flights to the moon possible.

Left: MIT computer scientist Katie Bouman w / stacks of hard drives of black hole image data.

Right: MIT computer scientist Margaret Hamilton w / the code she wrote that helped put a man on the moon.

(image credit @floragraham) #EHTblackhole #BlackHoleDay #BlackHole pic.twitter.com/Iv5PIc8IYd

When she started working on the project, Bouman knew very little about black extinguishers. Her specialty is imaging with the help of computer systems. "To represent the black hole in the center of the Milky Way is like trying to spot a grapefruit on the moon," Bouman said in 2016 about her project. "To represent such a thing, a telescope with a diameter of 10,000 kilometers would be necessary, which is not possible because the diameter of the earth is less than 13,000 kilometers."

Even the EHT project's eight telescopes were just one single 8000-kilometer-diameter antenna. Bouman's team filled this gap with the CHIRP (Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction) algorithm. For this, the researchers resorted to a trick: Normally, an astronomical signal reaches two telescopes at slightly different times. This difference is important to be able to filter visual information from the data. The earth's atmosphere, however, can falsify the image.

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"Too much stuff in between"

The algorithm therefore collects the data from three telescopes. This allows the noise from the earth's atmosphere to be filtered out - leaving behind a coherent picture.

However, the researchers first had to translate this for the human eye. Because the telescopes caught radio waves that people can not see. "Radio waves bring many benefits," explains Bouman. "They can penetrate walls as well as galactic dust, we would never be able to see into the center of our galaxy because there's too much stuff in between." The radio waves therefore had to be displayed in red for the picture.

The young scientist now wants to make videos of black holes. "As long as you're excited and motivated to work," she says, "nobody should feel they can not make it."