The story of the girl, who became an important part of the historical event, made her a heroine according to social networks.
Katie Bowman
On April 10, astrophysicists presented the first-ever image of a black hole. An international team of more than 200 scientists worked on the photo for several years. And one of the most important members of the team was Katie Bouman, a 29-year-old who developed an algorithm to visualize data from telescopes around the world that tracked the black hole.
The first ever photograph of a black hole.
Within hours, Bowman became the heroine of social media users and the "face" of the historic event. And scientists admit that without it, the first photo of a black hole might not have turned out.
The black hole observing project called Event Horizon Telescope was launched in 2012. Astrophysicists wanted to collect data on the black hole at the center of galaxy M87 in the constellation Virgo, but to do so they would have needed a telescope that could not support its own weight.
So scientists used eight different telescopes in Hawaii, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Chile and the South Pole. But the project participants did not know how to synchronize the data and turn it into a single snapshot. That's where Bowman helped them.
In 2016, the girl was in graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - she studied computer science and artificial intelligence. That same year, Bowman began developing the first version of an algorithm that would turn data from different telescopes into a single image, as if taken from one "big" telescope the size of the Earth.
Bowman talks about his work at the TED conference (Russian subtitles available)
In 2017, the Event Horizon Telescope project collected millions of gigabytes of data about a black hole in galaxy M87. There was so much data that it was sent to MIT on several hundred hard drives - it was impossible to transmit everything over the Internet. For the next two years, Bowman led the team that processed all the information using her algorithm and several others.
Even this amount of data the girl called "scarce, noisy and limited," so the team had to check everything and select the "most likely" variants of what a black hole could look like. The work was complicated by the fact that no one knew what black holes actually looked like - the team worked almost blindly.
In June 2018, specialists received the first version of the black hole's image, collected from different telescopes. On April 10, a photo of a satisfied Bowman seeing the result of her work went viral.
Kathy Bowman sees reconstructed photo of a black hole for the first time
Bowman is only part of the huge group of people who worked on the first photo of the black hole. But the story of a girl who, while not an astrophysicist, contributed to a historical event made her a social media hero. She has been compared to American scientist Margaret Hamilton, who led the development of software for the Apollo space program.
1969: Margaret Hamilton with the code that led us to the moon. 2019: Katie Bowman with the data that led us to the black hole
Three years ago, MIT graduate Katie Bowman led the creation of the algorithm that took the first-ever photo of a black hole
In 2016, the girl was in graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - she studied computer science and artificial intelligence. That same year, Bowman began developing the first version of an algorithm that would turn data from different telescopes into a single image, as if taken from one "big" telescope the size of the Earth.
None of us could have done it alone. It was made possible by a lot of different people with their own backstories. I would like to encourage everyone to continue to push the boundaries of science. Even if at first it may not seem as mysterious as a black hole.
Katie Bowman, author of the algorithm.
According to tjournal.ru
Поделитесь:
- Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Skype (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
- Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)