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The Black Hole Image Data Was Spread Across 5 Petabytes Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Wednesday, an international team of scientists published the first image of a black hole ever. It looked like a SpaghettiO, and yet the image was an incredible scientific achievement that gave humanity a glimpse of one of the universe's most destructive forces and confirmed long-held theories -- namely, that black holes exist. Storing the raw data for the image was a feat itself -- tiny portions of data spread across five petabytes stored on multiple hard drives, the equivalent of 5,000 years worth of MP3s. Katie Bouman, a computer scientist and assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, led the development of the algorithm that imaged the black hole. An image of her posing with some of the data drives went viral as observers praised her success.
The massive amounts of data were essential to creating the image of the black hole. Bouman and other scientists coordinated radio telescopes all over the Earth, each pointed at the black hole and gathering data at different times. The data scientists then pieced this information together and used an algorithm to fill in the blanks and generate a likely image of the black hole. The five petabytes of data took up such a massive amount of digital and physical space it couldn't be sent over the internet. Instead, the hard drives were flown to processing centers in Germany and Boston where the data was assembled. On Reddit's /r/datahoarder subreddit, a community dedicated to spreading the passion of hoarding vast amounts of data, the drives were bigger news than the scientific achievement itself.
The massive amounts of data were essential to creating the image of the black hole. Bouman and other scientists coordinated radio telescopes all over the Earth, each pointed at the black hole and gathering data at different times. The data scientists then pieced this information together and used an algorithm to fill in the blanks and generate a likely image of the black hole. The five petabytes of data took up such a massive amount of digital and physical space it couldn't be sent over the internet. Instead, the hard drives were flown to processing centers in Germany and Boston where the data was assembled. On Reddit's /r/datahoarder subreddit, a community dedicated to spreading the passion of hoarding vast amounts of data, the drives were bigger news than the scientific achievement itself.
Let's start measuring storage space by the ton! We can have Kilotons and Megatons...wait, that sounds very familiar...
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
She designed the algorithm. This does not necessarily relates to lines of code. Also eht-imaging is used for a wide area of applications. Mr. Chael is a PhD student at Harvard working on that piece of software. While Dr. Bouman performed the analysis and "developed the algorithm that turned telescopic data into the historic photo we see today". Here is her CV https://people.csail.mit.edu/k...
If Chael had done all this, his supervisors had claimed that or pushed that he would have been in the media.
Honestly, would you question her abilities if she would have been a male professor?
As someone who's entire job is taking scientist's algorithms and explaining them to computers, number of lines of code contributes has nothing to do with how much of the 'brains' one is behind something.
Manbabies don't know the difference. All they have is some dim recognition that being marginally competent and male is no longer enough to get by and scares the shit out of them.
Which happens to look exactly how we'd expect to see the simulation that was done for Interstellar to look if we saw it from where we are, and with the equipment we have.
Honestly, you're directly getting photons for which the last thing they touched was a black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, in the middle of another galaxy, 53.5m years ago, 53.5m light years away.
The picture isn't photographically beautiful because it never would be at those kinds of distances. That it even *exists* and produces anything at all is astounding.