Is it possible to create an image of something that by definition is impossible to see?
That was the question computer scientist Katie Bouman set out to answer five years ago as a lead member of the Event Horizon Telescope, an international collaboration between astronomers, engineers, physicists and mathematicians tasked with creating the first-ever image of a black hole in space.
And she did it. In April 2019 Katie published the picture — a dark landscape (because, space) with an orange-tinted ring circling a black center. She designed the algorithm that compiled thousands of terabytes of data from telescopes all over the world to create the image, and at the age of 29 made scientific history.
Katie was always on a scientific fast-track. In 2011 she graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Electrical Engineering. She went directly to MIT, where she earned a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2013, and four years later her Ph.D.
The image, which to admittedly untrained eyes looks a lot like an orange doughnut, was made possible by a network of radio telescopes focused over two years toward a black hole more than 54 million light years from Earth. It was created from thousands of terabytes of data that was captured by telescopes in Hawaii, Chile, the South Pole, and other locations around the world.
(I’m not even going to attempt to explain the science behind all this; instead, watch Katie’s 2017 TEDx Talk where she explains the remarkable project in detail and compares it to a disco ball.)
Today, Dr. Bouman is an assistant professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, where her research focuses on computational imaging. She continues to design systems that make it possible to observe phenomena that to date are too difficult or even impossible to measure.
Not bad for a woman who only recently turned 30.