Katie Bouman: Black hole colleagues dismiss attacks over hero scientists's role in creating famous image

'Stop'

Katie Bouman, the scientist who became a hero after helping to create the famous first image of a black hole, has repeatedly looked to shine a light on the colleagues that she worked with to do it.

Her new found fame has however led to a number of trolls suggesting she is receiving undue credit, and that more attention should be given to men.

Dr Bouman has won praise from all over the world for her help in creating the image, being tweeted about hundreds of thousands of times and even winning praise from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In just about every discussion of the results, she has looked to highlight the work of the huge team of scientists who helped create the work. Though Dr Bouman worked on the algorithm that helped create the picture, she did so with a team and using data that came from astronomers who helped capture the radio signals that let the image be created in the first place.

“No one algorithm or person made this image, it required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat," she wrote on Facebook soon after the results were announced.

Still the interest she has received has led to attacks from some people who believe she is receiving too much credit for the work. That is despite the fact she has never claimed to be responsible, and has highlighted her colleagues at every opportunity.

Numerous fake accounts have been set up in her name that suggest she has attempted to claim undue credit for the work and that others – usually men – should be getting attention instead. A common claim suggested that a man had actually written "850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black-hole image algorithm", for instance, and was passed around social media along with pictures of Dr Boumer.

But Andrew Chael, the graduate student who has been repeatedly credited with doing that work, has tweeted that it a mischaracterisation of how the work was done and is a false understanding of what he himself did.

"So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the [software library that helped created the image] to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman," he wrote. "Stop.

"While I wrote much of the code for one of these pipelines, Katie was a huge contributor to the software; it would have never worked without her contributions and the work of many others who wrote code, debugged, and figured out how to use the code on challenging EHT data.

"With a few others, Katie also developed the imaging framework that rigorously tested all three codes and shaped the entire paper.

"As a result, this is probably the most vetted image in the history of radio interferometry. I'm thrilled Katie is getting recognition for her work and that she's inspiring people as an example of women's leadership in STEM.

"I'm also thrilled she's pointing out that this was a team effort including contributions from many junior scientists, including many women junior scientists. Together, we all make each other's work better; the number of commits doesn't tell the full story of who was indispensable.

"So while I appreciate the congratulations on a result that I worked hard on for years, if you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and reconsider your priorities in life," he concluded, before committing to stick around on Twitter and continue to post about black holes, "space, being a gay astronomer, Ursula K. Le Guin, architecture, and musicals".