n the movie "Interstellar," we get an up-close look at a supermassive black hole.

Set against a
backdrop of bright gas, the black hole's massive gravitational pull bends light into a
ring. However, this isn't a real photograph, but a computer graphic rendering an artistic
interpretation of what a black hole might look like.

0:31A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein first published his theory of general relativity. In the
years since then,scientists have provided a lot of evidence in support of it. But one thing
predicted from this theory, black holes, still have not been directly observed. Although we have
some idea as to what a black hole might look like, we've never actually taken a picture of one
before. However, you might be surprised to know that that may soon change. We may be seeing
our first picture of a black hole in the next couple years.Getting this first picture will come down to
an international team of scientists, an Earth-sized telescopeand an algorithm that puts together
the final picture. Although I won't be able to show you a real picture of a black hole today, I'd like
to give you a brief glimpse into the effort involved in getting that first picture.

1:18My name is Katie Bouman, and I'm a PhD student at MIT. I do research in a computer
science lab that works on making computers see through images and video. But although I'm not
an astronomer, today I'd like to show you how I've been able to contribute to this exciting project.

1:34If you go out past the bright city lights tonight, you may just be lucky enough to see a
stunning view of the Milky Way Galaxy. And if you could zoom past millions of stars, 26,000 light-
years toward the heart of the spiraling Milky Way, we'd eventually reach a cluster of stars right at
the center. Peering past all the galactic dust with infrared telescopes, astronomers have watched
these stars for over 16 years. But it's what they don't see that is the most spectacular. These
stars seem to orbit an invisible object. By tracking the paths of these stars, astronomers have
concluded that the only thing small and heavy enough to cause this motion is a supermassive
black hole an object so dense that it sucks up anything that ventures too close even light.

2:19But what happens if we were to zoom in even further? Is it possible to see something that, by
definition, is impossible to see? Well, it turns out that if we were to zoom in at radio
wavelengths, we'd expect to see a ring of light caused by the gravitational lensing of hot
plasma zipping around the black hole. In other words, the black hole casts a shadow on this
backdrop of bright material, carving out a sphere of darkness. This bright ring reveals the black
hole's event horizon, where the gravitational pull becomes so great that not even light can
escape. Einstein's equations predict the size and shape of this ring, so taking a picture of it
wouldn't only be really cool, it would also help to verify that these equations hold in the extreme
conditions around the black hole.

3:01However, this black hole is so far away from us, that from Earth, this ring appears incredibly
small the same size to us as an orange on the surface of the moon. That makes taking a
picture of it extremely difficult. Why is that? Well, it all comes down to a simple equation. Due to a
phenomenon called diffraction, there are fundamental limits to the smallest objects that we can
possibly see. This governing equation says that in order to see smaller and smaller, we need to
make our telescope bigger and bigger.But even with the most powerful optical telescopes here on
Earth, we can't even get close to the resolution necessary to image on the surface of the
moon. In fact, here I show one of the highest resolution images ever taken of the moon from
Earth. It contains roughly 13,000 pixels, and yet each pixel would contain over 1.5 million
oranges.

3:54So how big of a telescope do we need in order to see an orange on the surface of the
moon and, by extension, our black hole? Well, it turns out that by crunching the numbers, you
can easily calculate that we would need a telescope the size of the entire Earth.

4:07(Laughter)

4:08If we could build this Earth-sized telescope, we could just start to make out that distinctive
ring of lightindicative of the black hole's event horizon. Although this picture wouldn't contain all
the detail we see in computer graphic renderings, it would allow us to safely get our first
glimpse of the immediate environment around a black hole.

4:25However, as you can imagine, building a single-dish telescope the size of the Earth is
impossible. But in the famous words of Mick Jagger, "You can't always get what you want, but if
you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need." And by connecting telescopes
from around the world, an international collaboration called the Event Horizon Telescope is
creating a computational telescope the size of the Earth, capable of resolving structure on the
scale of a black hole's event horizon. This network of telescopes is scheduled to take its very first
picture of a black hole next year. Each telescope in the worldwide network works together. Linked
through the precise timing of atomic clocks, teams of researchers at each of the sights freeze
light by collecting thousands of terabytes of data. This data is then processed in a lab right here
in Massachusetts.

5:12So how does this even work? Remember if we want to see the black hole in the center of our
galaxy, we need to build this impossibly large Earth-sized telescope? For just a second, let's
pretend we could builda telescope the size of the Earth. This would be a little bit like turning the
Earth into a giant spinning disco ball. Each individual mirror would collect light that we could then
combine together to make a picture.However, now let's say we remove most of those mirrors so
only a few remained. We could still try to combine this information together, but now there are a
lot of holes. These remaining mirrors represent the locations where we have telescopes. This is
an incredibly small number of measurements to make a picture from. But although we only
collect light at a few telescope locations, as the Earth rotates, we get to see other new
measurements. In other words, as the disco ball spins, those mirrors change locationsand we get
to observe different parts of the image. The imaging algorithms we develop fill in the missing
gaps of the disco ball in order to reconstruct the underlying black hole image. If we had
telescopes located everywhere on the globe in other words, the entire disco ball this would
be trivial. However, we only see a few samples, and for that reason, there are an infinite number
of possible images that are perfectly consistent with our telescope measurements. However, not
all images are created equal. Some of those images look more like what we think of as images
than others. And so, my role in helping to take the first image of a black hole is to design
algorithms that find the most reasonable image that also fits the telescope measurements.

6:45Just as a forensic sketch artist uses limited descriptions to piece together a picture using
their knowledge of face structure, the imaging algorithms I develop use our limited telescope
data to guide us to a picture that also looks like stuff in our universe. Using these algorithms,
we're able to piece together picturesfrom this sparse, noisy data. So here I show a sample
reconstruction done using simulated data, when we pretend to point our telescopes to the black
hole in the center of our galaxy. Although this is just a simulation, reconstruction such as this give
us hope that we'll soon be able to reliably take the first image of a black hole and from it,
determine the size of its ring. Although I'd love to go on about all the details of this
algorithm, luckily for you, I don't have the time.

7:32But I'd still like to give you a brief idea of how we define what our universe looks like, and
how we use this to reconstruct and verify our results. Since there are an infinite number of
possible images that perfectly explain our telescope measurements, we have to choose between
them in some way. We do this by ranking the images based upon how likely they are to be the
black hole image, and then choosing the one that's most likely.

7:56So what do I mean by this exactly? Let's say we were trying to make a model that told us
how likely an image were to appear on Facebook. We'd probably want the model to say it's pretty
unlikely that someone would post this noise image on the left, and pretty likely that someone
would post a selfie like this one on the right. The image in the middle is blurry, so even though it's
more likely we'd see it on Facebook compared to the noise image, it's probably less likely we'd
see it compared to the selfie.

8:21But when it comes to images from the black hole, we're posed with a real conundrum: we've
never seen a black hole before. In that case, what is a likely black hole image, and what should
we assume about the structure of black holes? We could try to use images from simulations
we've done, like the image of the black hole from "Interstellar," but if we did this, it could cause
some serious problems. What would happen if Einstein's theories didn't hold? We'd still want to
reconstruct an accurate picture of what was going on. If we bake Einstein's equations too much
into our algorithms, we'll just end up seeing what we expect to see. In other words, we want to
leave the option open for there being a giant elephant at the center of our galaxy.
8:59(Laughter)

9:01Different types of images have very distinct features. We can easily tell the difference
between black hole simulation images and images we take every day here on Earth. We need a
way to tell our algorithms what images look like without imposing one type of image's features too
much. One way we can try to get around this is by imposing the features of different kinds of
images and seeing how the type of image we assume affects our reconstructions. If all images'
types produce a very similar-looking image, then we can start to become more confident that the
image assumptions we're making are not biasing this picture that much.

9:36This is a little bit like giving the same description to three different sketch artists from all
around the world. If they all produce a very similar-looking face, then we can start to become
confident that they're not imposing their own cultural biases on the drawings. One way we can try
to impose different image features is by using pieces of existing images. So we take a large
collection of images, and we break them down into their little image patches. We then can treat
each image patch a little bit like pieces of a puzzle. And we use commonly seen puzzle pieces to
piece together an image that also fits our telescope measurements.

10:14Different types of images have very distinctive sets of puzzle pieces. So what happens
when we take the same data but we use different sets of puzzle pieces to reconstruct the
image? Let's first start with black hole image simulation puzzle pieces. OK, this looks
reasonable. This looks like what we expect a black hole to look like. But did we just get
it because we just fed it little pieces of black hole simulation images?Let's try another set of
puzzle pieces from astronomical, non-black hole objects. OK, we get a similar-looking
image. And then how about pieces from everyday images, like the images you take with your own
personal camera? Great, we see the same image. When we get the same image from all
different sets of puzzle pieces, then we can start to become more confident that the image
assumptions we're makingaren't biasing the final image we get too much.

11:04Another thing we can do is take the same set of puzzle pieces, such as the ones derived
from everyday images, and use them to reconstruct many different kinds of source images. So in
our simulations, we pretend a black hole looks like astronomical non-black hole objects, as well
as everyday images like the elephant in the center of our galaxy. When the results of our
algorithms on the bottom look very similar to the simulation's truth image on top, then we can
start to become more confident in our algorithms. And I really want to emphasize here that all of
these pictures were created by piecing together little pieces of everyday photographs, like you'd
take with your own personal camera. So an image of a black hole we've never seen before may
eventually be created by piecing together pictures we see all the time of people, buildings, trees,
cats and dogs. Imaging ideas like this will make it possible for us to take our very first pictures of
a black hole, and hopefully, verify those famous theories on which scientists rely on a daily basis.
12:01But of course, getting imaging ideas like this working would never have been possible
without the amazing team of researchers that I have the privilege to work with. It still amazes
me that although I began this project with no background in astrophysics, what we have achieved
through this unique collaboration could result in the very first images of a black hole. But big
projects like the Event Horizon Telescope are successful due to all the interdisciplinary
expertise different people bring to the table.We're a melting pot of astronomers, physicists,
mathematicians and engineers. This is what will make it soon possible to achieve something
once thought impossible.

12:35I'd like to encourage all of you to go out and help push the boundaries of science, even if it
may at first seem as mysterious to you as a black hole.

12:44Thank you.

12:45(Applause)