An image of the moment the researcher whose algorithm helped reconstruct the first ever image of a black hole has swiftly made its way around the internet.
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Scientist Katie Bouman, 29, was snapped at the moment she first saw the fruits of her - and plenty of others around the world's - labour coming to fruition.
"Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed," Ms Bouman posted on Facebook, accompanying the photo. "I'm so excited that we finally get to share what we have been working on for the past year!"
Bouman, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, started working on the algorithm as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied electrical engineering and computer science.
She was one of about three dozen computer scientists who used algorithms to process data gathered by the Event Horizon Telescope project, a worldwide collaboration of astronomers, engineers and mathematicians, The Washington Post reported.
"The image shown today is the combination of images produced by multiple methods," Bouman wrote. "No one algorithm or person made this image, it required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat. It has been truly an honour, and I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you all."
The picture was made with equipment that detects wavelengths invisible to the human eye, so astronomers added colour to convey the ferocious heat of the gas and dust, glowing at a temperature of perhaps millions of degrees. But if a person were to somehow get close to this black hole, it might not look quite like that, astronomers said.
"It's kind of the beginning into having another window into what black holes can tell us about our love, and physics," Ms Bouman told the scientific journal Nature.
"Already we've learned so much. Even though we had predicted that if you had a black hole you'd get this ring of light, we didn't know we were going to get that ring of light - and that's what we were kind of testing.
"We could've gotten just a blob - so seeing that ring, and seeing a ring that has a size that is consistent with other measurements that had been done completely differently I think that in itself, just being able to see that ring of light, to see that it exists, is huge."
Black holes are the "most extreme environment in the known universe", University of Waterloo theoretical physicist Avery Broderick said, a violent, churning place of "gravity run amok". Unlike smaller black holes, which come from collapsed stars, super-massive black holes are mysterious in origin.
The black hole is about 6 billion times the mass of our sun and is in a galaxy called M87. Its "event horizon" - the precipice, or point of no return where light and matter get sucked inexorably into the hole - is as big as our entire solar system.
with AP
