Just a few years ago, Katie Bouman (then a PhD student at MIT) presented this TED talk about the massive collective research effort involved in the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. Three years latter, today, this collaboration announced the first-ever picture of a black hole. Katie led the creation of a new imaging algorithm that helped make this possible.
Yep, they have found a way to register the image of a black hole that is about 55 million light years away from Earth. The method is truly inventive, involving an array of telescopes across the globe, atomic clocks, cutting edge machine learning and more than 5 petabytes of data. You can see more about it in this short video or in the public announcement made today.
I know this is a bit off-topic in this blog but my inner nerd child is too excited to let this one pass. This is a big day.
Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
