If it wasn’t for Arash Roshanineshat, we wouldn’t have seen those images for ages.

Back in April, NASA made history by releasing images of a black hole. This took years of collaboration from scientists around the world – one of whom is a graduate student from the University of Arizona. Arash Roshanineshat played a critical role in helping to speed up the data that was being processed so we can see the images with the naked eye.

Roshanineshat joined the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project in 2017 as an intern. According to the graduate student, that was the year all of the data was captured to finally see the black hole images.

The next step was to process the data. This is where Roshanineshat used his expertise to help. He was part of a team that worked on speeding up the processing of the data, which is measured in petabytes (equivalent to 1000 terabytes). To put it into a more day-to-day perspective, Roshanineshat says the data used to create just one image of the black hole is the same as the amount of data needed to create 14,000 selfies.

The team believes these black hole images will help scientists in the future. “It isn’t only to prove the existence of the black hole,” said Roshanineshat. “It also means the study of black hole physics.”

In other words, scientists want to find out about the actual realm of black holes and what surrounds it. Before these images were captured, everything scientists knew about black holes were merely based on theories.

Roshanineshat says he’s helping with the next steps of this process, which includes processing the data even faster and capturing more images of black holes. The goal for this EHT project is to eventually capture a video of a black hole.