The Dark Saga of Katie Bouman
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. 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.
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