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Post by Admin on Apr 10, 2019 22:36:24 GMT
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration observed the supermassive black holes at the center of M87 and our Milky Way galaxy (SgrA*) finding the dark central shadow in accordance with General Relativity, further demonstrating the power of this 100 year-old theory.  A world-spanning network of telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope zoomed in on the supermassive monster in the galaxy M87 to create this 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,” Sheperd Doeleman, EHT Director and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said April 10 in Washington, D.C., at one of seven concurrent news conferences. The results were also published in six papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The much-anticipated big reveal of the image “lives up to the hype, that’s for sure," says Yale University astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, who is not on the EHT team. "It really brings home how fortunate we are as a species at this particular time, with the capacity of the human mind to comprehend the universe, to have built all the science and technology to make it happen." (SN Online: 4/10/19) The image aligns with expectations of what a black hole should look like based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which predicts how spacetime is warped by the extreme mass of a black hole. The picture is “one more strong piece of evidence supporting the existence of black holes. And that, of course, helps verify general relativity,” says physicist Clifford Will of the University of Florida in Gainesville who is not on the EHT team. “Being able to actually see this shadow and to detect it is a tremendous first step.” |
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Post by Admin on Apr 12, 2019 18:25:46 GMT
After sexist social media trolls tried to diminish the role of computer scientist Katie Bouman in capturing this week’s first-ever image of a black hole by claiming a male colleague did most of the work, that coworker blasted them in a now-viral Twitter thread.
Harvard graduate student Andrew Chael, a member of the international team that took the historic photo, stood up for Bouman Thursday night against the sexist smears, explaining that her work was key to developing an algorithm for capturing the image.
Trolls began spreading memes on Reddit and Twitter this week, falsely claiming that Chael wrote “850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code” and “did 90% of the work. Where’s his credit?”
Chael set the record straight, explaining that Bouman, an assistant professor at Caltech, helped develop the algorithm while a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. He praised her “as an example of women’s leadership” in science and technology fields.
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Post by Admin on Apr 15, 2019 18:21:23 GMT
Worried people were starting to be fun and normal again? Fear not! Katie Bouman, who led the creation of the algorithm and tested five petabytes of data in order to achieve the picture of the black hole for the Event Horizon Telescope project, is now facing internet trolls saying she’s getting too much credit. I’d like for them to try to even figure out how to start writing an algorithm.  The “trolls” (as I will call them, because what else are they? Concerned citizens worried about the work that men didn’t do?) were focused on the fact that, based on limited data and assumptions, it seemed that an astrophysicist named Andrew Chael wrote most of the code on an algorithm that was used to obtain the picture. Chael is the man who these attackers claim “wrote all the code,” and when they found another algorithm, by Mareki Honma, had also been used in creating the image, they deemed that the one that led to the picture and cried out about how Bouman stole credit from two men!  While that’s not at all the case, I just have to laugh, because how many times throughout history have women lost credit for their work because a man took it? And now we’re supposed to feel sorry that Katie Bouman is getting credit (and rightfully so!) for something she worked on while two men aren’t? Again, while all part of a team effort (including those two men!), this is a huge success made possible by Bouman’s work for which she is credited first on the peer-reviewed documentation. The reality is that several teams worked on their own versions of the image that were then composited, but as The Telegraph explains, that was only possible in the first place because of the CHIRP algorithm created by a team Bouman led. The algorithm sorted the impossibly large set of data collected by the EHT project down to what would be needed to create the image (the actual black hole data), and even the resulting, sorted data set was still mind-bogglingly huge (5 petabytes): |
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