FOR THE first time, we’ve seen a photograph of a black hole in space. It’s three million times bigger than the Earth, 40 billion kilometres in diameter and 500 million, trillion kilometres away from Earth at the centre of the Messier 87 galaxy.

It’s difficult to imagine how massive and far away it is. It is so big it required a network of eight telescopes, from the South Pole to Spain to capture the image. The information generated by the telescopes was stored on hundreds of hard drives. In all, five petabytes (five million gigabytes) of digital data. In MP3 audio terms, that’s enough storage for 5,000 years’ worth of continuous music.

There was so much data it was faster to take the physical hard drive and fly it commercially from each of the telescopes to Boston in the US and Bonn in Germany, where the data was interpreted, than try to transfer the data via the fastest internet connection. The person who led the team that turned the data into a photograph was Dr Katie Bouman, a 29-year-old computer scientist. She developed the mathematical algorithms for a computer programme that took the data from each of the telescopes and combined it to make the final image. No single telescope on Earth (or in space) is big enough to see the black hole and it took ten days for the eight telescopes to scan the area of space where the black hole was located.

The legacy of brilliant women in astronomy and the space programme is an important one, which is often not recognised enough.

In 1969 NASA sent men the moon. It required specific software to control the flight, the lunar lander and all the systems. That job was in the hands of another remarkable US scientist, Margaret Hamilton, a maths graduate. In the 1960s computer science wasn’t even an academic discipline, people learned “on the job”. Hamilton had to handwrite her programmes as there were no laptop computers or calculators in those days. The code was written on forms given to a keypunch operator who entered it into a typewriter like machine that punched holes into a card. The cards were fed into a mainframe computer and the code could then be printed out. If you made a mistake, it was often only picked up when the programme failed to work. Hamilton’s programmes for the NASA moon landing resulted in 11,000 pages of code that, when stacked up, was as tall as Hamilton herself at about 165cm. The computer that controlled the NASA moon landing was about 1,300 times less powerful than an iPhone 5.

Both women achieved remarkable things in computer science. Hamilton helped humans explore, for the first time, a planetary body away from Earth. Bouman has allowed us to see what we once thought was impossible – a black hole. Their work should not be underestimated.

But what are we to make of the first photo of a black hole? It was a bit blurred and to me looked like a custard filled ring doughnut. The intense black centre, the black hole itself, is a region around a phenomenon known as a singularity, a single point in space and time that is infinitely dense. It is so dense not even light can escape, hence the name black hole. The edge of the black hole is called the event horizon.

The bright red and gold ring that surrounds the black hole is called an accretion disc.

It contains gases, dust and other stellar debris that is being dragged towards the black hole. It forms a flattened spinning disc that gets extremely hot and emits x-rays and gamma rays. Because they are so dense black holes have an extreme gravitational pull. This is so big it causes time to slow down – a process known as time-dilation. Black holes and their accretion discs are extremely interesting, but weird regions of space and time. Einstein first predicted their existence in 1916, but he never believed that they really existed. Black holes form when stars grow so big they begin to collapse in on themselves, eventually forming a singularity.

Scientists predict that at the centre of every galaxy there is a black hole, including our own milky way. Understanding how they form and what their properties are may reveal to us how our universe began and how it has developed over the past 14 billion years.

Until now we’ve only had models and simulations of black holes created by computers from the predictions of astrophysicists. What they really look like has been revealed to us by Bouman and her team. One of the most remarkable things is how close to the predictions of Einstein the real black hole is.