Anonymous to the public just days ago, a US computer scientist named Katie Bouman has become an overnight sensation due to her role in developing a computer algorithm that allowed researchers to take the world’s first image of a black hole. “I’m so excited that we finally get to share what we have been working on for the past year!” the 29 year-old Bouman, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, gushed on her Facebook account Wednesday after the image was published. The term “black hole” refers to a point in space where matter is so compressed that it creates a gravity field from which even light cannot escape.
