Like Bruna Marquezine, Morena Baccarin, Maria Fernanda Cândido and many other prominent Brazilians, the scientist Lia Medeiros has a very promising international career.
The difference is that she's not on the big screen or on the charts; she is at the same institute where Albert Einstein worked in his last years of life!
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Pudera, Lia is neither a singer nor an actress. She is an astrophysicist working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The young woman, just 35 years old, led a team that improved the first image made of a black hole – taken in 2019 and improved in 2023.
You may have seen the image out there: it's a black background with a red, white, and orange circle.
Black hole registered in 2019 and its improved version in 2023. (Photo: Medeiros et al. 2023/Access via Galileo magazine)
It may seem like a simple task, but it is not. According to the astrophysicist, in an interview with Galileo magazine, it is not just pointing a camera from here on Earth to the
“To make the image that way, with the resolution of a cell phone, we would have to have a telescope literally the size of the Earth”, highlighted Lia Medeiros.
Lia explained that they used a technique called interferometry, which works more or less like this: "several telescopes spread across the planet work as a team of telescopes". In this way, they look into the black hole collecting data at the same time.
Medeiros explained that telescopes don't just collect visible images; they also collect information from other electromagnetic waves. This all provides a basis for putting together a “jigsaw puzzle” and forming an image.
With interferometry, each telescope collects a little bit of information. And so the scientists put each little piece together until they form an image. “But we don't have enough telescopes to understand everything. There is missing information”, pointed out the astrophysicist. What's missing creates that blurry effect pictured above.
The Brazilian team sought, through a lot of programming, a way to change the sharper photo. And that involves a lot of logic, a lot of calculation and, above all, a lot of mathematics. No problem for Lia so far, as she has always liked numbers.
Carioca, Lia Medeiros believes that mathematics is a universal language. And the passion for her came from her father, professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of São Paulo (USP). So, we can say that the path taken towards science was “from the cradle”.
The young woman fell in love with astrophysics in the last years of high school, studied in the United States. As the language was different, she saw in mathematics that language that is the same in all countries.
"For me, it's inspiring to think that we humans can use math to understand what's going on in the universe, to make predictions," she mused.
After school, she already entered the University of California, where she majored in physics and astrophysics. From there, she moved to another campus at the educational institution, where she completed her master's and doctorate.
Only later did he join the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, on the other side of the country, with the aim of studying the work of the German physicist albert einstein.
“Much of what I've done in recent years has been focused on using images to test Einstein's theory. For example, we use circle size to test whether the black hole in space is consistent with the specific black hole predicted by theory,” she said.
And you know what? “Einstein is still right”, underlined the Brazilian.
Lia Medeiros and her team still have a lot to work on. After all, we still don't understand how the universe really works. We also don't have much concrete information about black holes – which, by the way, are on the radar of astrophysics.
“I always hope to learn more about black holes, about what happens to the matter around them, how they grow and how they are affected by the galaxy”, highlighted Medeiros.
Besides, this brilliant Brazilian likes to be restless. For her, “science has to be like this: each result generates new questions and new directions to understand what is happening”.
Graduated in Social Communication at the Federal University of Goiás. Passionate about digital media, pop culture, technology, politics and psychoanalysis.
