#Andrew Chael

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

A supermassive black hole's strong magnetic fields are revealed in a new light

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration has published new results that describe for the first time how light from the edge of the supermassive black hole M87* spirals as it escapes the black hole's intense gravity, a signature known as circular polarization. The way light's electric field prefers to rotate clockwise or counterclockwise as it travels carries information about the magnetic field and types of high-energy particles around the black hole.

A new paper, published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, supports earlier findings from the EHT that the magnetic field near the M87* black hole is strong enough to occasionally stop the black hole from swallowing up nearby matter.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is the world's most powerful millimeter/ submillimeter telescope, and a key instrument for the EHT. The spiraling light at the heart of this research is actually made up of low frequency radio waves—light that can't be seen by the human eye or optical telescopes, but can be observed by the many radio telescopes, including ALMA, working together across the EHT.

"Circular polarization is the final signal we looked for in the EHT's first observations of the M87 black hole, and it was by far the hardest to analyze," says Andrew Chael, an associate research scholar at the Gravity Initiative at Princeton University, who coordinated the project.

"These new results give us confidence that our picture of a strong magnetic field permeating the hot gas surrounding the black hole is the right one. The unprecedented EHT observations are allowing us to answer long-standing questions about how black holes consume matter and launch jets outside their host galaxies."

In 2019, the EHT released its first image of a ring of hot plasma close to the event horizon of M87*. In 2021, EHT scientists released an image showing the directions of the oscillating electric fields across the image. Known as linear polarization, this result was the first sign that the magnetic fields close to the black hole were ordered and strong. The new measurements of the circular polarization—which indicate how light's electric fields spiral around the linear direction from the 2021 analysis—provide yet more conclusive evidence for these strong magnetic fields.

ALMA provided both data and calibration for these results, and served as the array reference antenna for the EHT. Without the much greater sensitivity of ALMA as the reference antenna, circular polarization could not have been detected.

IMAGE....A computer simulation of a disk of plasma around the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy. A new analysis of the circularly polarized, or spiraling light, in EHT observations shows that magnetic fields near the black hole are strong. These magnetic fields push back on infalling matter and help launch jets of matter at velocities near the speed of light out. Credit: George Wong

[jcmarchi]

Galactic ‘Lightsabers’: Answering Longstanding Questions About Jets from Black Holes - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/galactic-lightsabers-answering-longstanding-questions-about-jets-from-black-holes-technology-org/

Galactic ‘Lightsabers’: Answering Longstanding Questions About Jets from Black Holes - Technology Org

The one thing everyone knows about black holes is that absolutely everything nearby gets sucked into them.

Almost everything, it turns out.

[embedded content]

“Even though black holes are defined as objects from which nothing can escape, one of the astonishing predictions of Einstein’s theory of relativity is that black holes can actually lose energy,” says Eliot Quataert, Princeton astrophysicist and current Member in the IAS School of Natural Sciences. “They can rotate, and just like a spinning top slows down over time and loses that energy in its rotation, a rotating black hole can also lose energy to its surroundings.”

Scientists have widely accepted this model since the 1970s. They knew that magnetic fields probably extracted energy from spinning black holes—they just didn’t know how.

A team of astrophysicists from IAS, Princeton University, and Vanderbilt University has now determined conclusively that energy close to the event horizon of M87’s central black hole is pushing outward, not inward. They have also created a way to test the prediction that black holes lose rotational energy, Quataert said, and to establish that this energy produces “the incredibly powerful outflows we see that we call jets.”

These energy outflow jets “are basically like million-light-year-long Jedi lightsabers,” said his former postdoctoral fellow Alexandru Lupsasca, and they can extend 10 times longer than the Milky Way galaxy.

Astrophysicists have discovered that the twisting magnetic field around a black hole determines the tell-tale polarization spiral observed in black hole images. In particular, the direction of energy flow (from the hole to the field or vice versa) determines the how the polarization twists. By measuring which way the polarization spirals, one can infer whether the magnetic field is extracting spin energy from the hole or pumping spin energy into it. Image credit: Andrew Chael, George Wong, Alexandru Lupsasca and Eliot Quataert, Princeton Gravity Initiative

The results of their work appear in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Andrew Chael, an associate research scholar in astrophysics, is the first author on the paper. He and co-author George Wong, current Frank and Peggy Taplin Member in the School of Natural Sciences, are both members of the Event Horizon Telescope team and have played a critical role in developing the models that are used to interpret black holes.

The team gave Chael credit for the vital insight at the core of the new paper: that the direction in which the magnetic field lines are spiraling reveals the direction of the energy flow. From that, “the rest sort of fell into place,” Quataert said.

“If you took the Earth, turned it all into TNT and blew it up 1,000 times a second for millions and millions of years, that’s the amount of energy that we’re getting out of M87,” said Wong.

Scientists have known for decades that as a black hole starts to spin, it drags the fabric of spacetime around with it. Magnetic field lines that thread through the black hole get dragged along, and that slows down the rotation, leading to the energy release.

“Our new, sharp prediction is that whenever you look at an astrophysical black hole, if it has magnetic field lines attached to it, there will be energy transfer—truly insane amounts of energy transfer,” said Lupsasca, assistant professor of physics and mathematics at Vanderbilt University.

While the energy flow close to the event horizon of M87’s central black hole is streaming outwards, the team said that the energy flow could theoretically go inward in a different black hole. They are confident in their link between energy flow and the direction of the magnetic field lines, and their prediction that the energy flow comes from the black hole will be tested with the launch of the still-theoretical “next generation” Event Horizon Telescope.

For the past year and a half, black hole researchers around the world have been proposing specs for the future instrument, Wong said. “It is incredibly exciting! Linking energy outflow to such a simple observable like this is a critical step on the path to obtaining direct observational evidence of black hole energy extraction. I look forward to seeing what kind of robust statements we’ll be able to make with the next generation of black hole images—and movies!”

To test the connection between black hole images and energy flow around black holes, the team used both simple models of a glowing ring of gas (left) and full 3D supercomputer simulations (right). By verifying that the connection between the spiral of polarization in the images persisted in both cases, they established that it could be potentially be used with real images of black holes from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to test if magnetic fields are extracting energy and spinning down the black hole. Image credit: Andrew Chael, George Wong, Alexandru Lupsasca and Eliot Quataert, Princeton Gravity Initiative

The four researchers stressed in their paper that they haven’t conclusively shown that the black hole’s spin “truly powers the extragalactic jet,” though the evidence certainly leans in that direction. Even though the levels of energy that their model shows are commensurate with what the jets need, they couldn’t rule out the possibility that the jet could be powered by rotating plasma outside the black hole. “I think it’s extremely likely the black hole powers the jet, but we can’t prove it,” said Lupsasca. “Yet.”

Source: Institute for Advanced Study

You can offer your link to a page which is relevant to the topic of this post.

[sjerzgirl]

There's a lot of news going on about the "black hole girl" right now, and how she's being given too much credit for her role in the historic first image of a black hole. Because this is too important, I want to set the record straight.Remember the kmi

Once Katie Bouman became the "face" of the black hole photo, and articles began to call her "the woman behind the black hole photo", an assortment of people that I'm strongly inclined to call incels but won't decided to figure out just how much of a role she had in it. Why? You'd have to ask them. Something about her attractiveness, youthfulness, and femaleness disturbed them to the point where they had to go digging.

And after digging, they found Andrew Chael, who wrote an algorithm, and put his algorithm online. Andrew Chael worked on the black hole photo as well. And because people kept saying that Katie Bouman wrote "the algorithm", these people decided that "the algorithm" in question must be Chael's.

So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael's commits totaled more than 850,000 lines, while Katie Bouman contributed only 2,400.

"Oh my god!" they all said. "He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she's the one getting all of the credit!"

They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.

"She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!"

There were, of course, those who tried to be kind. "She's always said that this was a team effort," they said. "We don't blame her, we blame the media. She didn't ask to become the poster girl of a team project she barely contributed to."

Meanwhile, Andrew Chael - a gay man - tweeted in defense of her. He thanked people for congratulating him on the work he'd spent years on but clarified that if they were doing so as a part of a sexist attack on Katie Bouman, they should go away and reconsider their lives. He said that his work couldn't have happened without Katie.

And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history

So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman's actual contributions were. As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally (having said he doesn't actually care how much of it he personally authored), someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.

Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then?

Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it.

I'll work my way backward because it's easier to explain that way.

The photo that everyone is looking at, the world famous black hole photo? It's actually a composite photo. It was generated by an algorithm credited to Mareki Honma. Honma's algorithm, based on MRI technology, is used to "stitch together" photos and fill in the missing pixels by analyzing the surrounding pixels.

But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?

The photos making up the composite were generated by 4 separate teams, led by Katie Bouman and Andrew Chael, Kazu Akiyama and Sara Issaoun, Shoko Koyama, Jose L. Gomez, and Michael Johnson. Each team was given a copy of the black hole data and isolated from each other. Between the four of them, they used two techniques - an older, traditional one called CLEAN, and a newer one called RML - to generate an image.

The purpose of this division and isolation of teams was deliberately done to test the accuracy of the black hole data they were all using. If four isolated teams using different algorithms all got similar results, that would indicate that the data itself was accurate.

And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.

But where did the data come from?

Eight radio telescopes around the world trained their attention on the night sky in the direction of this black hole. The black hole is some ungodly distance away, a relative speck amidst billions of celestial bodies. And what the telescopes caught was not only the data of the black hole but the data of everything else as well.

Data that would need to be sorted.

Clearly, it's not the sort of thing you can sort by hand. To separate the wheat (one specific black hole's data) from the chaff (literally everything else around and between here and there) required an algorithm that could identify and single it out, calculations that were crunched across 800 CPUs on a 40Gbit/s network. And given that the resulting black hole-specific data was 5 petabytes (hundreds of pounds worth of hard drives!) you can imagine that the original data set was many times larger.

The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors".

CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.

At the age of 23, she knew nothing about black holes. Her field is computer science and artificial intelligence, topics she'd been involved in since high school. She had a theory about the shadows of black holes, and her algorithm was designed to find those shadows. Katie Bouman used a variety of what MIT called "clever algebraic solutions" to overcome the obstacles involved in creating the CHIRP algorithm. And though she had a team working to help her, her name comes first on the peer-reviewed documentation.

It's called the CHIRP algorithm because that's what she named it. It's the only reason these images could be created, and it's responsible for creating some of the images that were incorporated into the final image. It's the algorithm that made the effort of collecting all that data worth it. Any data analyst can tell you that you can't analyze or visualize data until it's been prepared first. Cleaned up. Narrowed down to the important information.

That's what Katie Bouman did, and after working as a data analyst for two years with a focus on this exact thing - data transformation - I can tell you it's not easy. It's not easy on the small data sets I worked with, where I could wind up spending a week looking for the patterns in a 68K Excel spreadsheet containing only one month's worth of programming for a single TV station!

Katie Bouman's 2,400 line contribution to Andrew Chael's work is on top of all of her other work. She spent five years developing and refining the CHIRP algorithm before leading four teams in testing the data created. The data collection phase of this took 10 days in April 2017, when the eight telescopes simultaneously trained their gazes towards the black hole.

This photo was ultimately created as a way to test Katie Bouman's algorithm for accuracy. MIT says that it's frequently more accurate than similar predecessors. And it is the algorithm that gave us our first direct image of a black hole.

Around the internet, there are people who have the misperception that Katie Bouman is just the pretty face, a minor contributor to a project where men like Andrew Chael and Mareki Honma deserve the credit. There are people pushing memes and narratives that she's only being given such acclaim because of feminism. And because Katie Bouman refuses to say that this was anything other than a team effort, even the most flattering comments about her still place her contributions to the photo at less-than-equal contribution to others.

But I'm writing to set the story straight:

When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true. She wasn't the only woman, but her work was crucial to making all of this happen.

When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal. And there are those who could just as easily say the same about his contribution, or the contributions of many others.

And while it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved played an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.

If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy?

Edited:

Thinking on it a little further, I felt I should clarify that I'm not actually trying to downplay Andrew Chael. His imaging algorithm is actually the result of years of effort, a labor of love. Each image that could be composited into the final photo brought with it a unique take on the data, without which the final photo wouldn't have been complete.

So let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole

were a woman

and a gay man.

===============================================

2nd Update (LONG!)

I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it's over 2K. I guess it's gone viral. That means I have some work to do.

I'm going to provide a list of the various articles I read to piece this together. When I wrote this, I wasn't trying to write an essay so I didn't put sources in and I didn't ensure that every detail is 100% accurate. So I'm doing that now.

Any edits I make are mentioned below (apart from spelling/grammar fixes). The resources that led me to write this are listed below. And because I value accuracy, I welcome people to point out mistakes of any kind. I'll make corrections and credit them here.

Edit: I incorrectly wrote that Bouman worked on the algorithm for 6 years and spent 2 years refining it. This was an accidental mush of facts: She's been working on this project for a total of 6 years (ages 23 to 29). She spent 3 years building CHIRP and 2 years refining it. I've corrected that and included that she led the four teams, as two separate articles mention it.

Edit: One of the leads for the 4 team project was a man named Jose L Gomez. I added that to the above, after being sent a twitter thread from Xu S. Han. Thank you! Twitter thread here:

https://twitter.com/saraissaoun/status/1116304522660519936?s=21

Edit: Thanks to Zoë Barraclough and someone who would prefer not to be named, for messaging me with another couple of edits. As confirmed on Kazu Akiyama's twitter, there were more than four leaders for the four imaging teams. As I find out the names of these co-leaders, I'll incorporate them into the post.

NEWEST LINK:

A very astute commenter left a note that included this link:

Caltech colloquium, Friday, April, 12th — “Imaging a Black Hole [Shadow] with the Event Horizon Telescope”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UGL_OL3OrCE

This hour-long presentation is of Katie Bouman describing in more detail. If you have some time, watch it! It does get technical but she keeps it engaging.

SOURCES:

http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606

This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman's contribution.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/229675-mit-researcher-develops-new-algorithm-for-imaging-black-holes

This goes into detail about Katie Bouman's algorithm. It describes how her algorithm differs from normal/traditional interferometric algorithms. This article explains the difficulty she faced in how trying to capture a black hole is like trying to photograph "a grapefruit on the moon." This also explains how Bouman's algorithm made all of this work-- it combines all of the data from the participating telescopes into, in essence, one massive telescope.

https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs

This is a 2016 TEDx talk from Bouman where she describes her work. Note: though I am intentionally focusing on her contributions specifically to defend the attention she's getting, she makes it clear that this was a team effort. She always gives credit to her teammates who work with her. She is full of humility and wonder.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/pw/papers_and_presentations/cvpr2016_bouman.pdf

This is the paper based on Bouman's work, where she's listed as first author. The position of her name is important. While the meaning of being first author can differ in certain fields, I'm basing the 'primary contributor' interpretation on the fact that multiple other articles say she was lead, MIT refers to the algorithm as hers, as well as the fact that she named CHIRP.

https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging

This is Andrew Chael's imaging library available on GitHub. It's where our original "sleuths" discovered that Bouman had contributed very little and assumed that she was stealing the glory from others. NOTE: Andrew Chael didn't make these claims or ask for this sort of attention!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06156

This is a paper describing Chael's work, which is impressive. Bouman is in the position of last author. Again, the relevance of the author order can differ, but the common significance of 'last author' is either the supervisor or the relative least contribution. In Bouman's paper, the position of last author seemed to indicate supervisor(s) based on the organization hierarchy on the EHT website. In this instance, I interpret Bouman's name being last as her being a minor contributor to Chael's specific work.

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/

This is the official EHT telescope website. I can't remember what I looked at here, it's in my history. I think I was trying to find out who Bouman's project lead was.

https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/1116518544961830918

This is the twitter thread where Chael defends Katie. He explains that he didn't write 850K lines, defends Katie and says that his algorithm couldn't have worked without her, mentions his LGBTQ status, and more. He seems like a great guy.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.20190411a/full/

This article speaks to some of the other people involved, including the project leader Sheperd Doeleman. This describes the process they went through in creating the black hole image and is where I got the information about how they split the teams into 4, and how the final image is a composite.

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-scientist-superstar-katie-bouman-algorithm.html

This is the article that talks about CHIRP sorting through a "true mountain" of data, and how that data was passed out to four teams to check for accuracy.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/10/black-hole-picture-captured-for-first-time-in-space-breakthrough

This article talks about Bouman coming up with a new algorithm to "stitch data across the EHT network" of telescopes, and how she led an elaborate series of tests (splitting the data up across four teams, etc) to verify that the output wasn't the result of a glitch or fluke.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.html

This article explains Honma's significant role. It describes what Honma's algorithm does and how it was used in this project.

https://www.nao.ac.jp/en/news/science/2019/20190410-eht.html

Here is another article that goes into more detail about Honma and team. He does a great job of explaining how all of the algorithms in question were, in fact, capable of producing accurate images of the black hole, and a part of the task of his algorithm was to verify the accuracy of those generated photos.

The final link is the document by all 200+ participants. This document is important because it gives such a clear idea of the work that went into this, the fabric of which Bouman is an integral part. While I'm intentionally highlighting her contributions in defense of her, it should be understood that, like with most scientific breakthroughs, there were many unsung heroes:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7

=============================================

Final Update:

As the furor begins to die down, I'm glad to see that more and more information is coming out about the people involved in this. I'm going to stop editing this post now, as it's been an exhilerating and exhausting process. But on a final note, I want to answer a few common questions.

FAQ:

Q: Why did you write this?

A: To counter the viral narrative that Katie Bouman contributed nothing to this years-long endeavor.

Q: Why didn't you call her Dr. Bouman? She has a title.

A: Without being certain of everyone's title, I decided to leave all titles off. This was an intentional decision to avoid the appearance of slighting other contributors.

Q: Are you trying to give her full credit for the project?

A: No. I don't believe that highlighting one person's contributions to something is the same as giving them full credit. When someone does a 'profile in courage' of a war veteran, they're not saying that one person won the entire war on their own, just that they played a vital part.

Q: What is your background? Are you a scientist?

A: I'm not a scientist and I don't have a college degree. I attended college briefly, first as a vocal major and later as a web development major. My knowledge of programming and data is self-taught and developed through work environments. My work experiences began with an internship for Independence Blue Cross and turned into a number of opportunities in multimedia, graphic and web design, programming, and most recently data analysis and data transformation with TiVo. Data remains my current field. Astrophysics is just a passion I've had since childhood.

Q: What do you think of the Occupy Democrats meme that she did everything 'single-handedly'?

A: I feel that's categorically false and I wish they hadn't done that. While I think that there' a legitimate purpose to celebrating women's roles in STEM, it's important at all times to be objective and accurate in all accounts.

Q: Do you think everyone who questioned her contributions are incels?

A: No. I'm one of those people who ultimately questioned her contributions as well, and I'm not an incel. Wanting to know the truth is legitimate. What isn't legitimate are the sexist and misogynist attacks she endured.

That's all, folks. Love and light to you all.There's a lot of news going on about the "black hole girl" right now, and how she's being given too much credit for her role in the historic first image of a black hole. Because this is too important, I want to set the record straight.

Once Katie Bouman became the "face" of the black hole photo, and articles began to call her "the woman behind the black hole photo", an assortment of people that I'm strongly inclined to call incels but won't decided to figure out just how much of a role she had in it. Why? You'd have to ask them. Something about her attractiveness, youthfulness, and femaleness disturbed them to the point where they had to go digging.

And after digging, they found Andrew Chael, who wrote an algorithm, and put his algorithm online. Andrew Chael worked on the black hole photo as well. And because people kept saying that Katie Bouman wrote "the algorithm", these people decided that "the algorithm" in question must be Chael's.

So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael's commits totaled more than 850,000 lines, while Katie Bouman contributed only 2,400.

"Oh my god!" they all said. "He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she's the one getting all of the credit!"

They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.

"She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!"

There were, of course, those who tried to be kind. "She's always said that this was a team effort," they said. "We don't blame her, we blame the media. She didn't ask to become the poster girl of a team project she barely contributed to."

Meanwhile, Andrew Chael - a gay man - tweeted in defense of her. He thanked people for congratulating him on the work he'd spent years on but clarified that if they were doing so as a part of a sexist attack on Katie Bouman, they should go away and reconsider their lives. He said that his work couldn't have happened without Katie.

And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history

So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman's actual contributions were. As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally (having said he doesn't actually care how much of it he personally authored), someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.

Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then?

Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it.

I'll work my way backward because it's easier to explain that way.

The photo that everyone is looking at, the world famous black hole photo? It's actually a composite photo. It was generated by an algorithm credited to Mareki Honma. Honma's algorithm, based on MRI technology, is used to "stitch together" photos and fill in the missing pixels by analyzing the surrounding pixels.

But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?

The photos making up the composite were generated by 4 separate teams, led by Katie Bouman and Andrew Chael, Kazu Akiyama and Sara Issaoun, Shoko Koyama, Jose L. Gomez, and Michael Johnson. Each team was given a copy of the black hole data and isolated from each other. Between the four of them, they used two techniques - an older, traditional one called CLEAN, and a newer one called RML - to generate an image.

The purpose of this division and isolation of teams was deliberately done to test the accuracy of the black hole data they were all using. If four isolated teams using different algorithms all got similar results, that would indicate that the data itself was accurate.

And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.

But where did the data come from?

Eight radio telescopes around the world trained their attention on the night sky in the direction of this black hole. The black hole is some ungodly distance away, a relative speck amidst billions of celestial bodies. And what the telescopes caught was not only the data of the black hole but the data of everything else as well.

Data that would need to be sorted.

Clearly, it's not the sort of thing you can sort by hand. To separate the wheat (one specific black hole's data) from the chaff (literally everything else around and between here and there) required an algorithm that could identify and single it out, calculations that were crunched across 800 CPUs on a 40Gbit/s network. And given that the resulting black hole-specific data was 5 petabytes (hundreds of pounds worth of hard drives!) you can imagine that the original data set was many times larger.

The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors".

CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.

At the age of 23, she knew nothing about black holes. Her field is computer science and artificial intelligence, topics she'd been involved in since high school. She had a theory about the shadows of black holes, and her algorithm was designed to find those shadows. Katie Bouman used a variety of what MIT called "clever algebraic solutions" to overcome the obstacles involved in creating the CHIRP algorithm. And though she had a team working to help her, her name comes first on the peer-reviewed documentation.

It's called the CHIRP algorithm because that's what she named it. It's the only reason these images could be created, and it's responsible for creating some of the images that were incorporated into the final image. It's the algorithm that made the effort of collecting all that data worth it. Any data analyst can tell you that you can't analyze or visualize data until it's been prepared first. Cleaned up. Narrowed down to the important information.

That's what Katie Bouman did, and after working as a data analyst for two years with a focus on this exact thing - data transformation - I can tell you it's not easy. It's not easy on the small data sets I worked with, where I could wind up spending a week looking for the patterns in a 68K Excel spreadsheet containing only one month's worth of programming for a single TV station!

Katie Bouman's 2,400 line contribution to Andrew Chael's work is on top of all of her other work. She spent five years developing and refining the CHIRP algorithm before leading four teams in testing the data created. The data collection phase of this took 10 days in April 2017, when the eight telescopes simultaneously trained their gazes towards the black hole.

This photo was ultimately created as a way to test Katie Bouman's algorithm for accuracy. MIT says that it's frequently more accurate than similar predecessors. And it is the algorithm that gave us our first direct image of a black hole.

Around the internet, there are people who have the misperception that Katie Bouman is just the pretty face, a minor contributor to a project where men like Andrew Chael and Mareki Honma deserve the credit. There are people pushing memes and narratives that she's only being given such acclaim because of feminism. And because Katie Bouman refuses to say that this was anything other than a team effort, even the most flattering comments about her still place her contributions to the photo at less-than-equal contribution to others.

But I'm writing to set the story straight:

When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true. She wasn't the only woman, but her work was crucial to making all of this happen.

When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal. And there are those who could just as easily say the same about his contribution, or the contributions of many others.

And while it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved played an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.

If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy?

Edited:

Thinking on it a little further, I felt I should clarify that I'm not actually trying to downplay Andrew Chael. His imaging algorithm is actually the result of years of effort, a labor of love. Each image that could be composited into the final photo brought with it a unique take on the data, without which the final photo wouldn't have been complete.

So let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole

were a woman

and a gay man.

===============================================

2nd Update (LONG!)

I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it's over 2K. I guess it's gone viral. That means I have some work to do.

I'm going to provide a list of the various articles I read to piece this together. When I wrote this, I wasn't trying to write an essay so I didn't put sources in and I didn't ensure that every detail is 100% accurate. So I'm doing that now.

Any edits I make are mentioned below (apart from spelling/grammar fixes). The resources that led me to write this are listed below. And because I value accuracy, I welcome people to point out mistakes of any kind. I'll make corrections and credit them here.

Edit: I incorrectly wrote that Bouman worked on the algorithm for 6 years and spent 2 years refining it. This was an accidental mush of facts: She's been working on this project for a total of 6 years (ages 23 to 29). She spent 3 years building CHIRP and 2 years refining it. I've corrected that and included that she led the four teams, as two separate articles mention it.

Edit: One of the leads for the 4 team project was a man named Jose L Gomez. I added that to the above, after being sent a twitter thread from Xu S. Han. Thank you! Twitter thread here:

https://twitter.com/saraissaoun/status/1116304522660519936?s=21

Edit: Thanks to Zoë Barraclough and someone who would prefer not to be named, for messaging me with another couple of edits. As confirmed on Kazu Akiyama's twitter, there were more than four leaders for the four imaging teams. As I find out the names of these co-leaders, I'll incorporate them into the post.

NEWEST LINK:

A very astute commenter left a note that included this link:

Caltech colloquium, Friday, April, 12th — “Imaging a Black Hole [Shadow] with the Event Horizon Telescope”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UGL_OL3OrCE

This hour-long presentation is of Katie Bouman describing in more detail. If you have some time, watch it! It does get technical but she keeps it engaging.

SOURCES:

http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606

This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman's contribution.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/229675-mit-researcher-develops-new-algorithm-for-imaging-black-holes

This goes into detail about Katie Bouman's algorithm. It describes how her algorithm differs from normal/traditional interferometric algorithms. This article explains the difficulty she faced in how trying to capture a black hole is like trying to photograph "a grapefruit on the moon." This also explains how Bouman's algorithm made all of this work-- it combines all of the data from the participating telescopes into, in essence, one massive telescope.

https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs

This is a 2016 TEDx talk from Bouman where she describes her work. Note: though I am intentionally focusing on her contributions specifically to defend the attention she's getting, she makes it clear that this was a team effort. She always gives credit to her teammates who work with her. She is full of humility and wonder.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/pw/papers_and_presentations/cvpr2016_bouman.pdf

This is the paper based on Bouman's work, where she's listed as first author. The position of her name is important. While the meaning of being first author can differ in certain fields, I'm basing the 'primary contributor' interpretation on the fact that multiple other articles say she was lead, MIT refers to the algorithm as hers, as well as the fact that she named CHIRP.

https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging

This is Andrew Chael's imaging library available on GitHub. It's where our original "sleuths" discovered that Bouman had contributed very little and assumed that she was stealing the glory from others. NOTE: Andrew Chael didn't make these claims or ask for this sort of attention!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06156

This is a paper describing Chael's work, which is impressive. Bouman is in the position of last author. Again, the relevance of the author order can differ, but the common significance of 'last author' is either the supervisor or the relative least contribution. In Bouman's paper, the position of last author seemed to indicate supervisor(s) based on the organization hierarchy on the EHT website. In this instance, I interpret Bouman's name being last as her being a minor contributor to Chael's specific work.

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/

This is the official EHT telescope website. I can't remember what I looked at here, it's in my history. I think I was trying to find out who Bouman's project lead was.

https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/1116518544961830918

This is the twitter thread where Chael defends Katie. He explains that he didn't write 850K lines, defends Katie and says that his algorithm couldn't have worked without her, mentions his LGBTQ status, and more. He seems like a great guy.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.20190411a/full/

This article speaks to some of the other people involved, including the project leader Sheperd Doeleman. This describes the process they went through in creating the black hole image and is where I got the information about how they split the teams into 4, and how the final image is a composite.

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-scientist-superstar-katie-bouman-algorithm.html

This is the article that talks about CHIRP sorting through a "true mountain" of data, and how that data was passed out to four teams to check for accuracy.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/10/black-hole-picture-captured-for-first-time-in-space-breakthrough

This article talks about Bouman coming up with a new algorithm to "stitch data across the EHT network" of telescopes, and how she led an elaborate series of tests (splitting the data up across four teams, etc) to verify that the output wasn't the result of a glitch or fluke.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.html

This article explains Honma's significant role. It describes what Honma's algorithm does and how it was used in this project.

https://www.nao.ac.jp/en/news/science/2019/20190410-eht.html

Here is another article that goes into more detail about Honma and team. He does a great job of explaining how all of the algorithms in question were, in fact, capable of producing accurate images of the black hole, and a part of the task of his algorithm was to verify the accuracy of those generated photos.

The final link is the document by all 200+ participants. This document is important because it gives such a clear idea of the work that went into this, the fabric of which Bouman is an integral part. While I'm intentionally highlighting her contributions in defense of her, it should be understood that, like with most scientific breakthroughs, there were many unsung heroes:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7

=============================================

Final Update:

As the furor begins to die down, I'm glad to see that more and more information is coming out about the people involved in this. I'm going to stop editing this post now, as it's been an exhilerating and exhausting process. But on a final note, I want to answer a few common questions.

FAQ:

Q: Why did you write this?

A: To counter the viral narrative that Katie Bouman contributed nothing to this years-long endeavor.

Q: Why didn't you call her Dr. Bouman? She has a title.

A: Without being certain of everyone's title, I decided to leave all titles off. This was an intentional decision to avoid the appearance of slighting other contributors.

Q: Are you trying to give her full credit for the project?

A: No. I don't believe that highlighting one person's contributions to something is the same as giving them full credit. When someone does a 'profile in courage' of a war veteran, they're not saying that one person won the entire war on their own, just that they played a vital part.

Q: What is your background? Are you a scientist?

A: I'm not a scientist and I don't have a college degree. I attended college briefly, first as a vocal major and later as a web development major. My knowledge of programming and data is self-taught and developed through work environments. My work experiences began with an internship for Independence Blue Cross and turned into a number of opportunities in multimedia, graphic and web design, programming, and most recently data analysis and data transformation with TiVo. Data remains my current field. Astrophysics is just a passion I've had since childhood.

Q: What do you think of the Occupy Democrats meme that she did everything 'single-handedly'?

A: I feel that's categorically false and I wish they hadn't done that. While I think that there' a legitimate purpose to celebrating women's roles in STEM, it's important at all times to be objective and accurate in all accounts.

Q: Do you think everyone who questioned her contributions are incels?

A: No. I'm one of those people who ultimately questioned her contributions as well, and I'm not an incel. Wanting to know the truth is legitimate. What isn't legitimate are the sexist and misogynist attacks she endured.

That's all, folks. Love and light to you all.

[music-thestrongestformofmagic]

Incels and other sexist men can't see a woman doing something incredible without fuming and trying to discredit her. They're now dissing on Katie Bouman, who helped write one of the algorithms that got us the black hole picture, saying she was just an assistant (they don't know what assistant professor is), and using Andrew Chael, her colleague in the Event Horizon Telescope team who helped write one of the codes, as ~the true person behind the codes who is being erased by this anti-men society~ or whatever. They're even saying crap like "lmao women really don't do shit". Andrew took to Twitter himself to call bullshit on that.

If y'all can spread this thread to counter such narrative it'd be great.

(x)

[theoppositeofadults]

On Reddit and Twitter, memes quickly went viral contrasting Bouman with Chael, who — per the viral images — was actually responsible for “850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black-hole image algorithm!”

The implication was clear: Bouman, pushed by an agenda-driven media, was getting all the attention. But Chael had done all the real work.

That’s completely wrong, Chael said in a viral Thursday night Twitter thread of his own. Not only are the claims in the meme flat-out incorrect, but Chael — as an openly gay man — is also part of an underrepresented demographic in his field.

“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 tweeted.

It’s not clear exactly when or where the backlash against Bouman started, but Chael first caught wind of it from friends who alerted him to a Reddit post. One post on the r/pics subreddit attracted hundreds of comments and thousands of “upvotes” before it was taken down, with many criticizing Bouman at his expense, said Chael, a 28-year-old graduate student in Harvard’s physics department. As one typical commenter complained: “Katie has been plastered everywhere as being responsible for the code but if this dude did pretty much all the work, seems kind of crappy he doesn’t get recognized.”

“It was clearly started by people who were upset that a woman had become the face of this story and decided, ‘I’m going to find someone who reflects my narrative instead,’” Chael said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Identical memes quickly spread across Twitter, where one typical response was, “Andrew Chael did 90% of the work. Where’s his credit?

”But those claims are flat-out wrong, Chael said. He certainly didn’t write “850,000 lines of code,” a false number likely pulled from GitHub, a Web-based coding service. And while he was the primary author of one piece of software that worked on imaging the black hole, the team used multiple different approaches to avoid bias. His work was important, but Bouman’s was also vital as she helped stitch together all the teams, Chael said.

“Katie was a huge part of our collaboration at every step,” Chael said.

In truth, singling out any one scientist in a massive, cross-disciplinary group effort like the Event Horizon Telescope’s project is bound to create misapprehensions. Many who shared an equally viral image of Bouman clutching her hands in joy at the sight of the black hole came away wrongly believing she was the sole person responsible for the discovery, an idea the postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has tried to correct.

“No one algorithm or person made this image,” Bouman wrote on Facebook, “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.”

But those who sought to diminish Bouman’s work — especially while boosting Chael in her place — were making an absurd argument, the astrophysicist said. The New Mexico native is on the Outlist of LGBTQ scientists in the astronomy and astrophysics fields, and advises gay undergraduates at Harvard.

“Yes, that was ironic that they chose me,” he said.

Despite having to speak out against the backlash, Chael said he’s also been heartened to see Bouman’s work held up as an inspiration and hopes it leads to more women in astrophysics and astronomy departments.

“I don’t want to downplay the fact that it’s a very male-dominated community, especially radio astronomy,” Chael said. “There are less women there than even in other fields of astronomy, which we have to work hard to change."

He added, “Katie and several other women scientists on our team are just incredible leaders in this effort, and I’m hoping this can be a chance for all of us to talk about doing better.”

[occidentaltourist]

The astrophysicist who teamed up with Katie Bouman and others on the black hole image project is not here for anyone’s concern-trolling, sexist bullshit. [x]

Personally, I’m looking forward to his tweets on gay astronomers and Ursula Le Guin!

[arrghigiveup]

There's a lot of news going on about the "black hole girl" right now, and how she's being given too much credit for her role in the historic first image of a black hole. Because this is too important, I want to set the record straight.

Once Katie Bouman became the "face" of the black hole photo, and articles began to call her "the woman behind the black hole photo", an assortment of people that I'm strongly inclined to call incels but won't decided to figure out just how much of a role she had in it. Why? You'd have to ask them. Something about her attractiveness, youthfulness, and femaleness disturbed them to the point where they had to go digging.

And after digging, they found Andrew Chael, who wrote an algorithm, and put his algorithm online. Andrew Chael worked on the black hole photo as well. And because people kept saying that Katie Bouman wrote "the algorithm", these people decided that "the algorithm" in question must be Chael's.

So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael made 850,000 commits to the GitHub repository, while Katie Bouman made only 2,400.

"Oh my god!" they all said. "He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she's the one getting all of the credit!"

They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.

"She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!"

There were, of course, those who tried to be kind. "She's always said that this was a team effort," they said. "We don't blame her, we blame the media. She didn't ask to become the poster girl of a team project she barely contributed to."

Meanwhile, Andrew Chael - a gay man - tweeted in defense of her. He thanked people for congratulating him on the work he'd spent years on but clarified that if they were doing so as a part of a sexist attack on Katie Bouman, they should go away and reconsider their lives. He said that his work couldn't have happened without Katie.

And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history

So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman's actual contributions were. As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally, someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.

Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then?

Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it.

I'll work my way backward because it's easier to explain that way.

The photo that everyone is looking at, the world famous black hole photo? It's actually a composite photo. It was generated by an algorithm credited to Mareki Honma. Honma's algorithm, based on MRI technology, is used to "stitch together" photos and fill in the missing pixels by analyzing the surrounding pixels.

But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?

The photos making up the composite were generated by 4 separate teams, led by Katie Bouman, Andrew Chael, Kazu Akiyama, Michael Johnson, and Jose L Gomez. Each team was given a copy of the black hole data and isolated from each other. Between the four of them, they used two techniques - an older, traditional one called CLEAN, and a newer one called RML - to generate an image.

The purpose of this division and isolation of teams was deliberately done to test the accuracy of the black hole data they were all using. If four isolated teams using different algorithms all got similar results, that would indicate that the data itself was accurate.

And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.

But where did the data come from?

Eight radio telescopes around the world trained their attention on the night sky in the direction of this black hole. The black hole is some ungodly distance away, a relative speck amidst billions of celestial bodies. And what the telescopes caught was not only the data of the black hole but the data of everything else as well.

Data that would need to be sorted.

Clearly, it's not the sort of thing you can sort by hand. To separate the wheat (one specific black hole's data) from the chaff (literally everything else around and between here and there) required an algorithm that could identify and single it out, calculations that were crunched across 800 CPUs on a 40Gbit/s network. And given that the resulting black hole-specific data was 5 petabytes (hundreds of pounds worth of hard drives!) you can imagine that the original data set was many times larger.

The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors".

CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.

At the age of 23, she knew nothing about black holes. Her field is computer science and artificial intelligence, topics she'd been involved in since high school. But she had a theory that black holes have shadows, and her algorithm was designed to find those shadows. Katie Bouman used a variety of what MIT called "clever algebraic solutions" to overcome the obstacles involved in creating the CHIRP algorithm. And though she had a team working to help her, her name comes first on the peer-reviewed documentation.

It's called the CHIRP algorithm because that's what she named it. It's the only reason these images could be created, and it's responsible for creating some of the images that were incorporated into the final image. It's the algorithm that made the effort of collecting all that data worth it. Any data analyst can tell you that you can't analyze or visualize data until it's been prepared first. Cleaned up. Narrowed down to the important information.

That's what Katie Bouman did, and after working as a data analyst for two years with a focus on this exact thing - data transformation - I can tell you it's not easy. It's not easy on the small data sets I worked with, where I could wind up spending a week looking for the patterns in a 68K Excel spreadsheet with only one month's worth of programming for a single TV station!

Katie Bouman's 2,400 line contribution to Andrew Chael's work is on top of all of her other work. She spent five years developing and refining the CHIRP algorithm before leading four teams in testing the data created. The data collection phase of this took 10 days in April 2017, when the eight telescopes simultaneously trained their gazes towards the black hole.

This photo was ultimately created as a way to test Katie Bouman's algorithm for accuracy. MIT says that it's far more accurate than similar predecessors. And it is the algorithm that gave us our first direct image of a black hole.

Around the internet, there are people who have the misperception that Katie Bouman is just the pretty face, a minor contributor to a project where men like Andrew Chael and Mareki Honma deserve the credit. There are people pushing memes and narratives that she's only being given such acclaim because of feminism. And because Katie Bouman refuses to say that this was anything other than a team effort, even the most flattering comments about her still place her contributions to the photo at equal or less-than-equal contribution to others.

But I'm writing to set the story straight:

When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true.

When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal.

And while it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved placed an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.

If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy.

Edited:

Thinking on it a little further, I felt I should clarify that I'm not actually trying to downplay Andrew Chael. His imaging algorithm is actually the result of years of effort, a labor of love. Each image that could be composited into the final photo brought with it a unique take on the data, without which the final photo wouldn't have been complete.

So let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole

were a woman

and a gay man.

=============================================== 2nd Update (LONG!)

I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it's over 2K. I guess it's gone viral. That means I have some work to do.

I'm going to provide a list of the various articles I read to piece this together. When I wrote this, I wasn't trying to write an essay so I didn't put sources in and I didn't ensure that every detail is 100% accurate. So I'm doing that now.

Any edits I make are mentioned below (apart from spelling/grammar fixes). The resources that led me to write this are listed below. And because I value accuracy, I welcome people to point out mistakes of any kind. I'll make corrects and credit them here.

Edit: I incorrectly wrote that Bouman worked on the algorithm for 6 years and spent 2 years refining it. This was an accidental mush of facts: She's been working on this project for a total of 6 years (ages 23 to 29). She spent 3 years building CHIRP and 2 years refining it. I've corrected that and included that she led the four teams, as two separate articles mention it.

Edit: One of the leads for the 4 team project was a man named Jose L Gomez. I added that to the above, after being sent a twitter thread from Xu S. Han. Thank you! Twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/saraissaoun/status/1116304522660519936…

http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606 This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman's contribution.

https://www.extremetech.com/…/229675-mit-researcher-develop… This goes into detail about Katie Bouman's algorithm. It describes how her algorithm differs from normal/traditional interferometric algorithms. This article explains the difficulty she faced in how trying to capture a black hole is like trying to photograph "a grapefruit on the moon." This also explains how Bouman's algorithm made all of this work-- it combines all of the data from the participating telescopes into, in essence, one massive telescope.

https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs This is a 2016 TEDx talk from Bouman where she describes her work. Note: though I am intentionally focusing on her contributions specifically to defend the attend she's getting, she makes it clear that this was a team effort. She always gives credit to her teammates who work with her. She is full of humility and wonder.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/…/papers_an…/cvpr2016_bouman.pdf This is the paper based on Bouman's work, where she's listed as first author. The position of her name is important. While the meaning of being first author can differ in certain fields, I'm basing the 'primary contributor' interpretation on the fact that multiple other articles say she was lead, MIT refers to the algorithm as hers, as well as the fact that she named CHIRP.

https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging This is Andrew Chael's imaging library available on GitHub. It's where our original "sleuths" discovered that Bouman had contributed very little and assumed that she was stealing the glory from others. NOTE: Andrew Chael didn't make these claims or ask for this sort of attention!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06156 This is a paper describing Chael's work, which is impressive. Bouman is in the position of last author. Again, the relevance of the author order can differ, but the common significance of 'last author' is either the supervisor or the relative least contribution. In Bouman's paper, the position of last author seemed to indicate supervisor(s) based on the organization hierarchy on the EHT website. In this instance, I interpret Bouman's name being last as her being a minor contributor to Chael's specific work.

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/ This is the official EHT telescope website. I can't remember what I looked at here, it's in my history. I think I was trying to find out who Bouman's project lead was.

https://twitter.com/thisgreyspir…/status/1116518544961830918 This is the twitter thread where Chael defends Katie. He explains that he didn't write 850K lines, defends Katie and says that his algorithm couldn't have worked without her, mentions his LGBTQ status, and more. He seems like a great guy.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/…/10.1063/PT.6.1.2…/full/ This article speaks to some of the other people involved, including the project leader Sheperd Doeleman. This describes the process they went through in creating the black hole image and is where I got the information about how they split the teams into 4, and how the final image is a composite.

https://phys.org/…/2019-04-scientist-superstar-katie-bouman… This is the article that talks about CHIRP sorting through a "true mountain" of data, and how that data was passed out to four teams to check for accuracy.

https://www.theguardian.com/…/black-hole-picture-captured-f… This article talks about Bouman coming up with a new algorithm to "stitch data across the EHT network" of telescopes, and how she led an elaborate series of tests (splitting the data up across four teams, etc) to verify that the output wasn't the result of a glitch or fluke.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.html This article explains Honma's significant role. It describes what Honma's algorithm does and how it was used in this project.

The final link is the document by all 200+ participants. This document is important because it gives such a clear idea of the work that went into this, the fabric of which Bouman is a part. While I intentionally highlight her contributions in defense of her, her statement that it was a team effort is true. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7

[sun-cheyne]

In memes that have quickly gone viral on the platforms, trolls said (Andrew) Chael was actually the one responsible for “850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black-hole image algorithm” and had done all of the actual work in the project.

But Chael was quick to correct that narrative, arguing it was sexist, with a thread of his own on Thursday that has since gone viral.

“So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging software library ... to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman. Stop,” he began in the Twitter thread.

“Our papers used three independent imaging software libraries (including one developed by my friend @sparse_k). 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.” “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,” he continued. “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,” he added, “if you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and reconsider your priorities in life. Otherwise, stick around — I hope to start tweeting more about black holes and other subjects I am passionate about — including space, being a gay astronomer, Ursula K. Le Guin, architecture, and musicals. Thanks for following me, and let me know if you have any questions about the EHT!”

Chael also made sure to clarify that he did not write "850,000 lines of code" for the project and said "there are about 68,000 lines in the current software, and I don't care how many of those I personally authored."

[queen-of-dirt]

No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, 4chan picking Andrew Chael as their poster boy when his twitter is very obviously left-wing and anti-trump is hilarious. Like they did all that work trying to discredit Dr. Bouman, which led 4chan/redditors to flood Andrew's twitter with this stuff:

Only for them to freak the fuck out and really show their true colours when he turned out to be gay and left wing (which they would have known if they had put a tenth of the time they put into trying to discredit Dr. Bouman into scrolling down Andrew's twitter)

If these guys actually cared about supporting Andrew they would leave him the fuck alone because he obviously doesn't want to be associated with him.

[glorioustidalwavedefendor]

This scientist's response to people saying Doctor Bouman took all the credit

(NOT MINE)

Source:

https://9gag.com/gag/av89pQO

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Black holes loose energy over time

A team of Princeton astrophysicists has now determined conclusively that energy close to black hole M87* is pushing outward, not inward, a longstanding debate within the field.

The one thing everyone knows about black holes is that absolutely everything nearby gets sucked into them.

Almost everything, it turns out.

“Even though black holes are defined as objects from which nothing can escape, one of the astonishing predictions of Einstein’s theory of relativity is that black holes can actually lose energy,” says astrophysicist Eliot Quataert, Princeton’s Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy on the Class of 1897 Foundation. “They can rotate, and just like a spinning top slows down over time and loses that energy in its rotation, a rotating black hole can also lose energy to its surroundings.”

Scientists have widely accepted this model since the 1970s. They knew that magnetic fields probably extracted energy from spinning black holes — they just didn’t know how.

A team of Princeton astrophysicists has now determined conclusively that energy close to the event horizon of black hole M87* is pushing outward, not inward. (M87 is the name of the galaxy, Messier 87, so the black hole at its center is designated M87*.) The researchers have also created a way to test the prediction that black holes lose rotational energy, Quataert said, and to establish it’s that energy that produces “the incredibly powerful outflows we see that we call jets.”

These energy outflow jets “are basically like million-light-year-long Jedi lightsabers,” said former Princeton postdoc Alexandru Lupsasca, and they can extend 10 times longer than the Milky Way galaxy.

The results of their work appear in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Andrew Chael, an associate research scholar in astrophysics, is the first author on the paper. He and co-author George Wong are both members of the Event Horizon Telescope team and have played a critical role in developing the models that are used to interpret black holes. Chael, Wong, Lupsasca and Quataert are all theorists affiliated with the Princeton Gravity Initiative.

The team gave Chael credit for the vital insight at the core of the new paper: that the direction in which the magnetic field lines are spiraling reveals the direction of the energy flow. From that, “the rest sort of fell into place,” Quataert said.

“If you took the Earth, turned it all into TNT and blew it up 1,000 times a second for millions and millions of years, that’s the amount of energy that we’re getting out of M87,” said Wong, an associate research scholar with the Princeton Gravity Initiative and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Scientists have known for decades that as a black hole starts to spin, it drags the fabric of spacetime around with it. Magnetic field lines that thread through the black hole get dragged along, and that slows down the rotation, leading to the energy release.

“Our new, sharp prediction is that whenever you look at an astrophysical black hole, if it has magnetic field lines attached to it, there will be energy transfer — truly insane amounts of energy transfer,” said Lupsasca, a former associate research scholar at Princeton who is now an assistant professor of physics and mathematics at Vanderbilt University, and who won the 2024 New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation for his black hole research.

While the energy flow close to M87*’s event horizon is streaming outwards, the team said that the energy flow could theoretically go inward in a different black hole. They are confident in their link between energy flow and the direction of the magnetic field lines, and their prediction that the energy flow comes from the black hole will be tested with the launch of the still-theoretical “next generation” Event Horizon Telescope.

For the past year and a half, black hole researchers around the world have been proposing specs for the future instrument, Wong said. “Papers like ours can play a crucial role in determining what we need. I think it’s an incredibly exciting time.”

The four researchers stressed in their paper that they haven’t conclusively shown that the black hole’s spin “truly powers the extragalactic jet,” though the evidence certainly leans in that direction. Even though the levels of energy that their model shows are commensurate with what the jets need, they couldn’t rule out the possibility that the jet could be powered by rotating plasma outside the black hole. “I think it’s extremely likely the black hole powers the jet, but we can’t prove it,” said Lupsasca. “Yet.”

“A Signature of Electromagnetic Energy Extraction in Polarized Black Hole Images,” by Andrew Chael, Alexandru Lupsasca, George N. Wong, and Eliot Quataert appears in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal (DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/acf92d). The research was supported by the Princeton Gravity Initiative, the Taplin Fellowship, the National Science Foundation (grant 2307888) and a Simons Foundation Investigator award.

The black hole M87* (the asterisk designates the black hole in the middle of galaxy M87) caught the world’s attention when it was first detected by the Event Horizon Telescope. Since then, Princeton astrophysicists have discovered that the twisting magnetic field around a black hole determines the tell-tale polarization spiral observed in black hole images. In particular, the direction of energy flow (from the hole to the field or vice versa) determines the how the polarization twists. By measuring which way the polarization spirals, one can infer whether the magnetic field is extracting spin energy from the hole or pumping spin energy into it. CREDIT Model by Andrew Chael, George Wong, Alexandru Lupsasca and Eliot Quataert, Princeton Gravity Initiative

A simple black hole model.

A 3D supercomputer simulation of M87*

To test the connection between black hole images and energy flow around black holes, the team used both simple models of a glowing ring of gas (left) and full 3D supercomputer simulations (right). By verifying that the connection between the spiral of polarization in the images persisted in both cases, they established that it could be potentially be used with real images of black holes from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to test if magnetic fields are extracting energy and spinning down the black hole.

Images by Andrew Chael, George Wong, Alexandru Lupsasca and Eliot Quataert, Princeton Gravity Initiative

[viraltiger]

Andrew Chael and Katie Bouman admiring their work - See more viral images on ViralTiger.org

[supreme-leader-stoat]

Black Hole Update

Hello! I’ve seen a lot of people talking about Katie Bouman and her work on the black hole picture, and sharing around photos of her excitement when they got the photo, and I’m glad that she’s getting recognition. However, while Bouman herself has emphasized that the project was a team effort, a lot of people seem to be overlooking or erasing the very notable contributions of some of the other scientists who worked on it, and that doesn’t sit great with me, so I’m here to draw attention to a couple of them as well.

This is Andrew Chael. He worked with Bouman on the algorithm to construct the image of the black hole and did most of the raw coding for it.

Speaking of that algorithm this is Mareki Honma, who is the man I’m given to understand was its original inventor. Here he is announcing the photo at a press conference in Tokyo.

And here is a link to Harvard’s page on all the contributing members of the Black Hole Initiative, including Bouman and these two!

[music-thestrongestformofmagic]

the black hole guy is gay?? gay rep in science is much needed too, though i still believe katie deserves all the praise she’s getting

(Omg I didn't get the notification for this and I have no idea when you sent it, sorry)

Yes!!! And I'm freaking loving it!!! Two of the main people in the Event Horizon Telescope who were responsible for the first picture of a black hole were a woman and a gay man!!! Dude, that made the whole ordeal get even better. This little LGBT+ nerd girl just loved it loved it loved it. And Katie's recognition doesn't have to come at the expense of Andrew's. They both kicked ass and deserve the world.

Long live Katie Bouman and Andrew Chael and minorities in STEM ✊

[braincoins]

Though it may have been nice to receive more recognition, Chael immediately took to Twitter to explain that the online trolls had exaggerated his contributions, and he defended Bouman's work. In addition, Chael said that as an openly gay man, he is also an underrepresented demographic in STEM.

"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," Chael wrote.

This is how you do it, folks.

[crazy-pages]

TL;DR: Sexists trying to use another Andrew Chael's contributions to this project to undermine Kate Bouman find out that this particular gay astronomer has zero patience for their internet hate mob bullshit.