Yesterday, the Event Horizon Telescope researches and National Science Foundation (which I should mention is directed by former Purdue president, France Córdova) released the first ever image of a black hole. For scientists like me, and probably a good portion of the population, it’s an absolutely stunning image. But I understand that for some, you may wonder why this is such a big deal? I could personally tell you why, but there are some great videos and resources that will do a better job explaining this better than I could:
In order to process all these measurements from across the globe and form the single image we saw yesterday, a complicated and computationally expensive algorithm was needed (so yes, it would have caused MATLAB to crash).