The Dark Saga of Katie Bouman
How a young scientist got sucked into the black hole of the internet
By Marina Koren
Two photos — one long anticipated, the other a surprise — became instantly famous in astronomy last week. First, there was the first-ever look at a black hole, a shadowy void encircled in a fiery ring of cosmic matter. Then, in the celebration that followed, another image emerged: a young computer scientist, hands over her mouth and eyes flashing with giddiness, as the image of the most mysterious object in the universe rendered on the computer screen in front of her.
This researcher, Katie Bouman, was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and a member of the team running Event Horizon Telescope, the effort to capture visual evidence of a black hole for the first time. After astronomers released that image last week, Bouman’s spread across the internet just as rapidly, on social media and in news stories. Her face, slightly blurry but beaming, was everywhere.
At first, the message was simple — Bouman stood out as a role model for young women and girls working in or aspiring to jobs in male-dominated science fields. A round of stories celebrated Bouman’s work on the algorithms that forged a mesmerizing photograph from a vat of telescope data. She was a symbol of female empowerment, a shatterer of…
