The first photo of a black hole was made by 29 year old Katie Bouman. While most major scientific breakthroughs have happened with new measuring devices (or by accident), Katie came up with the photo using A.I.
3 years ago, as a 26 year old MIT, she wondered what would it take to be a modern-day Galileo - taking the first photo of a black hole.
She realised no telescope would be big enough, saying it would be like “taking an image of a grapefruit on the moon, but with a radio telescope. To image something this small means that we would need a telescope with a 10,000-kilometer diameter, which is not practical, because the diameter of the Earth is not even 13,000 kilometers.”
So instead she created an algorithm that would use A.I. and big data to collect images from radio telescopes around the world to make the image.
She called the algorithm "CHIRP" (Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors.). She then worked with Harvard's Center for Astrophysics, MIT, and 200 astronomers, zooming in on the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a galaxy in the Virgo cluster, 55 million light years away.
Three years and 8 million gigabytes of data later, here's the FB post Katie shared of her reaction to the first black hole image (the image of which has already become the most shared and meme'd photo of 2019 within the last 24 hours).
And today MIT also shared a photo of Katie with the stacks of hard drives used to create the image, alongside MIT's Margaret Hamilton standing next to the books of code she wrote to help put a man on the moon - exactly 50 years ago.
(The data Katie collected to make the image would be equal to 677,963,000,000 printed pages - more than a billion books)
We're moving into a new era of scientific discovery where A.I. and under-30 scientists like Katie are leading new breakthroughs, outpacing the creation of new measuring devices and old-fashioned human observation.
Leave a Reply