Dave Bangert | Journal & Courier

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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – As the scientific world celebrated the first-ever image of a black hole on Wednesday, there was a push to make sure Katie Bouman was getting her due.

Bouman, a West Lafayette High School graduate, was being credited for coming up with the algorithm that cleared the way for the Event Horizon Telescope to take a photo of a black hole that is 55 million light years away and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun.

Photos circulating on social media after Wednesday’s announcement referenced the hand-over-mouth incredulous look from Bouman, as she watched that first image come together. In her social media post, Bouman wrote, “Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed.”

Black hole questions answered: Why the first-ever black hole image is blurry, and more questions answered

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MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab posted in response: “Just to clarify, this was the first image *ANYONE EVER MADE* of a black hole. #small details.”

According to a 2016 account in the MIT News, Bouman led the development of the algorithm while a graduate student at MIT, working with a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the MIT Haystack Observatory.

The algorithm, according to the report, would stitch together data collected from radio telescopes positioned across the globe, hoping to essentially turn the Earth into “a large radio telescope dish.”

Here's the moment when the first black hole image was processed, from the eyes of researcher Katie Bouman. #EHTBlackHole #BlackHoleDay #BlackHole (v/@dfbarajas) pic.twitter.com/n0ZnIoeG1d — MIT CSAIL (@MIT_CSAIL) April 10, 2019

Scientist Katie Bouman just posted about the moment when "the first image I ever made of a black hole" was processed.



Just to clarify, this was the first image *ANYONE EVER MADE* of a black hole. #smalldetails https://t.co/m0aCniRysp#EHTBlackHole #BlackHoleDay #BlackHole pic.twitter.com/C8wF5t6GGA — MIT CSAIL (@MIT_CSAIL) April 10, 2019

At the time, Bouman told MIT News: “A black hole is very, very far away and very compact. .. (Taking a picture of the black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy is) equivalent to 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.”

The algorithm Bouman’s team developed was meant to fill those gaps.

Bouman, now an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at California Institute of Technology, later gave a Ted Talk that hinted of the photo that eventually was presented to the public Wednesday.

Charles Bouman said his daughter told the family ahead of time that a big announcement was coming Wednesday.

First photo of a black hole revealed: 'We have seen what we thought was unseeable'

“But she wasn’t allowed to tell us what it was, exactly, though we sort of guessed that it had to be the first image,” Charles Bouman, the Showalter Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University, said. “She kept it absolutely secret, even from her parents.”

Charles Bouman said his daughter was doing imaging research with Purdue professors on the West Lafayette campus while she was in high school. He credited Cynthia Stauffacher, a Purdue biology professor and director of the Lafayette Regional Science Fair, for stoking an interest in research “that was already there.”

He said Wednesday’s announcement – and the attention it was bringing Katie – was exciting as a parent as well as a researcher, seeing that she had a role in bringing together people “in interdisciplinary work, which is hugely challenging.”

“But also, technically, this is sort of a field of essential interest for me, in my own research,” said Charles Bouman, whose work deals with medical imaging and materials imaging. “Although I would say she took a much bigger step. … I see this as a giant step, because it’s an example of what I’d call a breakthrough result. It’s really bringing what we call machine learning and artificial intelligence to scientific discovery.”

At Katie Bouman’s high school, Phil Pusey, head of West Lafayette’s science department, said he was thrilled and planned to show his classes on Thursday what Bouman, a 2007 West Side graduate, had done.

Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

“She was a super-detailed kind of kid, even when I had her in class,” said Pusey, who had her in an eighth-grade general science class at West Lafayette Junior High. “She was always ordered and organized, lab notes were written out to super-detail. … I can’t wait to show my kids in class. That’s really cool.”

The picture unveiled Wednesday reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the "nearby" Virgo galaxy cluster. It looked like a flaming orange, yellow and black ring.

The picture reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the "nearby" Virgo galaxy cluster. It looked like a flaming orange, yellow and black ring.

Black hole picture: Meet one of the scientists behind the first-ever picture of a black hole

“We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole," said Sheperd Doeleman, Event Project Horizon project director at Harvard University. “This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers.”

Since the black hole is, well, black, what we're seeing in the image is gas and dust circling around the hole, just far enough away to be safe.

That hot disk of material that encircles the hole shines bright, according to NASA. Against a bright backdrop, such as this disk, a black hole appears to cast a shadow.

“For years, science fiction movies have imagined what black holes look like," said Duncan Brown of Syracuse University. "The picture taken by the Event Horizon Telescope shows us what they really look like."

Images came from the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight telescopes around the world specifically designed to peer at black holes. The telescopes are in Chile, Hawaii, Arizona, Mexico, Spain and at the South Pole.

Her name is Katie Bouman, an MIT graduate.



3 years ago she led the creation of a new algorithm to produce the first-ever image of a black hole we are seeing today. #BlackHole #EventHorizonTelescope pic.twitter.com/peZcLSjQmJ — Jen Zhu (@jenzhuscott) April 10, 2019

🚨 THE FIRST-EVER PICTURE OF A BLACK HOLE IS HERE! 🚨 Computer scientist Katie Bouman led the development of the algorithm that made taking this picture possible. Watch her @TEDxBeaconSt talk to learn more: https://t.co/txTFNFa29r #EHTBlackHole pic.twitter.com/HJLoL729c3 — TEDx (@TEDx) April 10, 2019

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

The image also helps confirm Einstein’s general relativity theory. Einstein a century ago even predicted the symmetrical shape that scientists just found.

“The Event Horizon Telescope allows us for the very first time to test the predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity around supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies,” according to project scientist Dimitrios Psaltis of the University of Arizona. “The predicted size and shape of the shadow theory match our observations remarkably well, increasing our confidence in this century-old theory.”

Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that “these remarkable new images of the M87 black hole prove that Einstein was right yet again."

The telescope caught whatever light it was able to detect from near the black hole. By combining the data from the various telescopes placed around the world, the Event Horizon Telescope has as much magnifying power as a telescope the size of the entire Earth.

This black hole was chosen as the first black hole to be photographed even though it's 2,000 times further away than the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy, known as Sagittarius A. Counterintuitively, this distant black hole is easier for Earth's telescopes to see than the one in our own galaxy.

Despite this, it's still a challenge to capture images of the distant object. It's like “taking a picture of a doughnut placed on the surface of the Moon,” according to Psaltis.

Most black holes are the condensed remnants of a massive star, the collapsed core that remains following an explosive supernova. A black hole's gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape their grasp.

Like all outer space objects, the image we're seeing is what the black hole looked like long ago. Since it's 53 million light-years away, we're seeing what the black hole looked like 53 million years ago.

“This astonishing image and discovery will allow us to better understand the early days of the cosmos and how it will evolve deep into the future," said David J. Eicher, editor in chief of Astronomy magazine.

"We’ve had evidence of the existence of black holes, but no one has seen the matter around them close up until now," Eicher said. "This new image will profoundly impact science and astronomy for generations to come.”

This breakthrough was announced Wednesday in a series of six papers published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Wednesday's announcement was made at news events around the world, in locations such as Washington, D.C., Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo.

Contributing: The Associated Press and USA TODAY.