Powehi / First Image of Black Hole

Confirmed 60,481

Part of a series on Space. [View Related Entries]

About

Powehi refers to a supermassive black hole that was the first and only black hole to be imaged in history. Revealed to the public by the National Science Foundation on April 10th, 2019, a photograph of the black hole was circulated online as an exploitable.

Origin

On April 10th, 2019, National Science Foundation issued a press release revealing the first ever photograph of a black hole.^[1] The photograph of black hole at the center of Messier 87 galaxy was made using the Event Horizon Telescope, an array of eight ground-based radio telescopes designed to capture the image. In the released photograph, a supermassive black hole and its shadow can be seen.

Spread

On the same day, National Science Foundation tweeted the image, with the post accumulating over 29,700 retweets and 53,400 likes within 12 hours.^[2]

Multiple major news outlets reported on the story, including news articles by ABC News,^[3] Telegraph,^[4], CNN^[5] and BBC.^[6]

In the hours following the public release of the image, it gained significant popularity online as an exploitable. For example, a post made by Redditor Dragonjazz, referncing Surprised Pikachu meme, gained over 33,600 upvotes in four hours.^[7]

Katie Bouman

On April 10th, 2019, Redditor iKojan tweeted a photograph of Dr. Katie Bouman, identifying her as "the computer scientist behind the first ever image of a black-hole" (shown below). Within 48 hours, the post gathered upwards of 195,800 points (86% upvoted) and 6,200 comments on /r/pics.^[8]

That day, Redditor GrumpyWendigo posted the photo to /r/photoshopbattles,^[9] where numerous edited examples were submitted in the comments. Meanwhile, a post titled "This is Andrew Chael. He wrote 850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black hole image algorithm" to /r/pics,^[13] which was subsequently deleted for having an "inappropriate title." The following day, Redditor SmellyTheBluCow submitted a post titled "Katie Bouman should not be getting credit for the picture if the black hole" to /r/unpopularopinion,^[11] citing the project's GitHub page showing that programmers Andrew Chael and Michael Johnson contributed a majority of commits. That day, Chael posted a thread on Twitter condemning "sexist attacks" on Bouman (shown below).

On April 12th, Redditor DankMemesKing777 posted an edited version of the photo with Minecraft on her computer screen to /r/dankmemes,^[10] where it gained over 54,200 points (93% upvoted) and 560 comments. That same day, The Washington Post^[12] published an article about the online controversy surrounding Bouman's work titled "Trolls hijacked a scientist’s image to attack Katie Bouman. They picked the wrong astrophysicist."