Photo Of Scientist Creating Her Historic Black Hole Image Goes Viral
Katie Bouman, a computer scientist, earned praise for her part in creating the visual. Her post on the moment she loaded the image is captivating, too.
For the first time in the history of humanity, people around the world Wednesday were able to see an image of a black hole 50 million light-years away.
The revolutionary image went viral in an instant, as did a photo of Katie Bouman, the 29-year-old who is partly responsible for making the astronomical image happen.
In the photo of Bouman, a member of the Event Horizon Telescope project, she braces herself as she loads the groundbreaking image onto her computer.
“Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed,” she wrote in the caption posted to Facebook.
Bouman is an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology’s computing and mathematical sciences department. She received her doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT in 2017.