Trolls on the Internet have tried to discredit Katie Bouman's work on the black hole project



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Katie Bouman, the 29-year-old researcher who became a celebrity after a viral photo of her circulated on the Internet as a result of her work that helped create the first image of a black hole on Wednesday .

However, Internet trolls have tried to discredit her work on the project, claiming that she was not playing a big role.

Bouman, a postdoctoral fellow who will soon be an assistant professor at Cal Tech, celebrated the work of a team that helped make possible the image of the black hole.

"No algorithm or person created this image, it took the incredible talent of a team of scientists from around the world and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods and the analysis techniques needed to obtain this image. seemingly impossible feat, "she wrote.

KATIE BOUMAN IS THE 29 YEAR-OLD SCIENTIST OF THE FIRST PICTURE OF BLACK HOLE

A photo of Bouman reacting to his sudden celebrity status became viral this week.

But after his new fame, Bouman became the target of internet trolls who said that Andrew Chael, a male colleague, had done most of the work on the project. Chael's memory that he said he was responsible for "850,000 of the 900,000 coded codes in the historical algorithm of black hole images" became viral on social media sites such as Reddit and Twitter , reported The Hill.

The first video published after a search of Katie Bouman on YouTube entitled "A woman achieves 6% of the work but gets 100% credit: Black Hole Photo," reported NBC News. A few hours later, he was at the top of YouTube's search results.

Chael responded to the memes in a feed on Twitter saying that the project "was a team effort" and congratulated Bouman for his work.

"So, apparently, a few people (I hope very little) online use the fact that I'm the main developer of eht-imaging software [sic] Software library to launch horrible and sexist attacks against my colleague on my friend Katie Bouman, Stop. "

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"Our documents used three independent imaging software libraries (one developed by my friend @sparse_k)," he wrote. "Although I wrote a lot of the code for one of these pipelines, Katie has contributed immensely to the software. it would never have worked without his contributions and the work of many other people who wrote code, debugged and figured out how to use the code to challenge the EHT data. "

Chael, an astrophysicist and student at Harvard University, said he had not "written 850,000 lines of code" and that there were "about 68,000 lines in the current software."

"So, even though I appreciate the congratulations for a result I've worked hard on for years, if you congratulate me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and rethink your priorities in life, "he wrote.

Chael wrote in a follow-up tweet that he was a homosexual astronomer and that he hoped to be able to tweet "more about black holes and about other topics that fascinate me".

Brie Stimson of Fox News contributed to this report.

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