In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope team gave the world the first glimpse of what a black hole actually looks like. But the image of a glowing, ring-shaped object that the group unveiled wasn’t a conventional photograph. It was computed — a mathematical transformation of data captured by radio telescopes in the United States, Mexico, Chile, Spain and the South Pole1. The team released the programming code it used to accomplish that feat alongside the articles that documented its findings, so the scientific community could see — and build on — what it had done.
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$32.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 52 print issues and online access
$199.00 per year
only $3.83 per issue
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Nature 589, 344-348 (2021)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00075-2
Updates & Corrections
-
Correction 22 January 2021: An earlier version of this feature erroneously stated that Paul Ginsparg migrated an early version of the arXiv preprint sharing system to the Internet.
-
Update 19 February 2021: This article has been updated with data from a survey that asked readers to weigh in on the codes selected in the Feature (see ‘Top choices for science code’ and ‘Overlooked software’).
-
Correction 08 April 2021: An earlier version of this story erred in describing the IPython Notebook development team and the size of the first version that was released.
References
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration et al. Astrophys. J. Lett. 875, L1 (2019).
Braig, K., Adams, P. D. & Brünger, A. T. Nature Struct. Biol. 2, 1083–1094 (1995).
Strasser, B. J. J. Hist. Biol. 43, 623–660 (2010).
Newmark, P. Nature 304, 108 (1983).
Manabe, S. & Bryan, K. J. Atmos. Sci. 26, 786–789 (1969).
Lawson, C. L., Hanson, R. J., Kincaid, D. R. & Krogh, F. T. ACM Trans. Math. Software 5, 308–323 (1979).
Ginsparg, P. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.2700 (2011).
Nature Photon. 6, 1 (2012).
Nature 563, 145–146 (2018).
Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I. & Hinton, G. E. in Proc. 25th Int. Conf. Neural Information Processing Systems (eds Pereira, F., Burges, C. J. C., Bottou, L. & Weinberger, K. O.) 1097–1105 (Curran Associates, 2012).
Related Articles
-
👁 Image
Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice -
👁 Image
arXiv at 20 -
👁 Image
Half a century of robust climate models
Subjects
Latest on:
Jobs
-
Associate or Senior Editor (Nature Geoscience – Biogeochemistry)
Job Title: Associate or Senior Editor (Nature Geoscience - Biogeochemistry) Organisation: Nature Portfolio Location: Shanghai, Beijing, Milan and P...
Shanghai, Beijing, Milan and Pune
Springer Nature Ltd
-
Associate or Senior Editor (Nature Geoscience - Solid Earth)
Job Title: Associate or Senior Editor (Nature Geoscience - Solid Earth) Organisation: Nature Portfolio Location: Shanghai, Beijing, Milan and Pune ...
Shanghai, Beijing, Milan and Pune
Springer Nature Ltd
-
Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Reviews Physics
Job Title: Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Reviews Physics Location: Shanghai, Beijing or Madrid – Hybrid working model Applications Deadline: 8...
Shanghai, Beijing or Madrid – Hybrid working model
Springer Nature Ltd
-
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Semiconductor Devices at NIMS
NIMS invites applications for a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Semiconductor Devices (approx. 4M-6M JPY per annum, at Tsukuba, Japan).
Tsukuba, Japan (JP)
National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS)
-
Permanent Researcher in Next-Generation Semiconductor Devices at NIMS
NIMS invites applications for a Permanent Researcher in Next-Generation Semiconductor Devices (approx. 6M-10M JPY per annum, at Tsukuba, Japan).
Tsukuba, Japan (JP)
National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS)
