What do you have to do to visualize what's going on right next to a black hole?

How do we image the invisible and how do we use combinations of amazing instruments but also computation to see things that

seem like it should be impossible to recover.

It's Tuesday, April 30th.

On this day in 1905, Albert Einstein completed his doctoral thesis.

You're listening to Science Friday.

I'm Cy Fry producer Charles Berquist.

Scientists have used a technique called computational

imaging to generate a 3D video of the movement of bright regions called

flares near the black hole at the center of our Milky Way. Guest host Ariel Dum Ross talks with Dr Katie

Bauman about the research and the challenge of seeing things that should be invisible.

When I hear black hole, I imagine an infinite darkness. Maybe it's something to do with the phrase,

gravity so strong, even light cannot escape. But the area around a black hole, an area called the accretion disk, is actually pretty bright with matter compressing hotter and hotter as it sucked in.

And amid that maelstrom, there are even brighter areas, bursts of energy that astronomers call flares.

Researchers are trying to better understand what those flares are and what they can tell us about the nature of black holes.

This week in the journal Nature Astronomy,

they published a three-dimensional video that they say is a reconstruction

of the movement of flares around the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way.

Joining me now to talk about that work is Dr. Katie Bauman.

She's an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences, electrical engineering, and astronomy at Caltech in Pasadena, California.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really excited to be here and tell you a little bit about what we've been working on.

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