A Black Hole is Imaged

On This Day in History: April 10

A scientist named Dr. Katie Bouman did some science stuff and we got to see a picture of a giant space anus. Dr. Bouman was not the only scientist involved in capturing the first-ever image of a black hole, generated on April 10, 2019; it was a team of over three dozen people from around the globe working in concert for many years to achieve such an amazing feat. But Bouman was personally thrust into the spotlight because at the moment the first image of the hole was produced, a colleague snapped a photo of the delighted young scientist and that pic went interstellar across the interwebs. When a woman became the public face of the project, the manbaby mob got big mad.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: April 10, 2019--

Bouman, an expert in computer imagery with a PhD from MIT, wrote a dissertation with the words “Imaging Black Holes” in the title. She’d been part of the Event Horizon Telescope team since 2013, leading the development of an algorithm that made capturing the image possible. She deserves much credit for the discovery, but in her own words, “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 instruments, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat.”

Why near-impossible? Because the gravitational pull of a black hole is so great, even light is like oh fuck guess I’m stuck here too. So, you can’t actually see the fucker. But how did we see the fucker? We saw around the fucker. The appropriately termed “supermassive” black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun, and it casts a shadow. The shadow is what an international team using various computer programs and a network of eight ground-based radio telescopes saw.

The black hole was found in the center of a galaxy far, far away, about 55 million light-years, called Messier 87. And like Star Wars has its toxic fandom, so, apparently, does the search for intergalactic space oddities. Bouman never tried to claim responsibility for the discovery, making her comments about it being a team effort in a viral Facebook post the same day it was imaged; her post included a photo of most of her imaging colleagues. Nevertheless, the misogynistic attacks against her were instantaneous and relentless. Outraged, the incel army found an ovary-absent hero in Bouman’s team member Dr. Andrew Chael, creating a meme proclaiming HE was the real genius behind imaging the black hole, and Bouman’s celebrity was just feminist media wanting to hold up an undeserving woman as responsible.

But then Chael was all the fuck you talking about? He explained that the meme making him the hero was bullshit, decrying the “awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman.” He added: “if you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and reconsider your priorities in life.”

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.