No doubts, it was a huge day for all of us, especially the scientists. An even bigger day for the Women scientists.
On Wednesday, we Earthlings got our first direct look at a black hole, thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope, an array of eight radio telescopes around the world working together to create the image. But in the midst of making jokes about how that photo kinda sorta looks the eye of Sauron and wondering how this newfound information could impact Albert Einstein’s theories of gravity, social media focused on making sure one of the women behind the project gets credit for her contributions.
3 years ago MIT grad student Katie Bouman led the creation of a new algorithm to produce the first-ever image of a black hole.
Today, that image was released.
More info: https://t.co/WITAL1omGl
2016 story: https://t.co/QV7Zf2snEP#EHTblackhole #EventHorizonTelescope pic.twitter.com/u6FBswmGDZ
— MIT CSAIL (@MIT_CSAIL) April 10, 2019
One of the images that are going viral is the one where she is standing next to the table consisting of a stack of hard disks of information she collected for capturing the black hole.
Computer scientist Katie Bouman and her awesome stack of hard drives for #EHTblackhole image data ? — reminds me of Margaret Hamilton and her Apollo Guidance Computer source code. ??? pic.twitter.com/MgOXiDCAKi
— Flora Graham (@floragraham) April 10, 2019
Bouman delivered a TED talk in 2016 called “How to take a picture of a black hole,” where she explained “getting this first picture will come down to an international team of scientists, an Earth-sized telescope and an algorithm that puts together the final picture.”
She made sure that everyone got credits as well. Here is her Facebook post.
