Triumphant Tales of Women in STEM

Katie Bouman – The Face of the Black Hole Project

Katie Bouman is one of our most recent remarkable women in STEM. Working as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, she led the development of a computer programme using algorithms that gave us our first ever image of a black hole in 2019. Until then any image of a black hole was an artist’s illustration. Due to their dark nature, these universal gravitational vacuum cleaners generally remain elusive.

The image showed a halo of dust and gas around the edges of the behemoth structure found in the centre of M87 – a giant elliptical galaxy located 55 million light-years from Earth. At 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun, the imaged supermassive black hole is more than 1,500 times more massive that the one lying at the centre of our galaxy.

Dr Bouman was able to use a network of eight powerful telescopes, called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) along with her algorithm to render the first ever images of a black hole in human history. Being an MIT graduate student, she has also been compared to the genius Margaret Hamilton (also an MIT graduate) who wrote the code that helped put Apollo astronauts on the Moon.

Thanks to Bouman, we now have another key piece of information that can help us understand black holes in more detail – her work has opened our eyes to the wonders of space even in darkness.

If you aren’t impressed with the picture of the first black hole, you haven’t quite understood the gravity of the situation!

Written by Harsh Patel

Vera Rubin - Bringing Dark Matter to Light

From fashioning her very own telescope out of cardboard as a child, to being the first woman to observe at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, astrophysicist Vera Rubin desired to understand the universe throughout her life. 

After being barred from Princeton University’s graduate astronomy programme due to her gender, in 1965 Rubin began work at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. And in the 1970s she began working on the rotation curves of galaxies – studying how fast stars travel around the centre of a galaxy. 

To Rubin’s surprise, she observed that stars on the outer edges of the Andromeda Galaxy were travelling just as fast as stars in the centre, going against accepted galaxy models at the time. This suggested that there must be some invisible matter whose gravity kept those stars from flying off into the Universe. Today, dark matter is still shrouded in mystery, we know little about what it’s made of. But thanks to Rubin’s results we know that it’s there, and there’s over five times more of it in the universe than “normal” matter. 

In 2019, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, an observatory currently under construction in Chile, was renamed the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in recognition of Rubin’s incredible career. This observatory will study dark matter in greater detail than ever before. It will provide answers to questions we may never have asked had it not been for Rubin’s discoveries, and it’s a fitting legacy for a woman who loved nothing more than to observe the night sky.  

Written by Catherine Muller

Nichelle Nichols - Actress to Astronaut Recruiter

Nichelle Nichols is an African-American actress who starred on Star Trek: The Original Series that aired in the 1960s. Her role as Lieutenant Uhura was ground-breaking. Not only were women of ethnic minorities rarely on television at that time, but her character was a high-ranking officer on the Enterprise. 

She almost left the show after the first season but was convinced to stay after talking to Dr Martin Luther King and finding out he was a massive Trekkie! 

At the time NASA’s Director of Science was a consultant for the show and conversations between the pair led to Nichols writing magazine columns about NASA and its lack of black and women astronauts. By the late 1970s NASA were keen to diversify their astronaut pool. Assisted by Nichols, in just four months more than 8,000 applications were received, including at least 1,600 women and 1,000 people from ethnic minority groups. She’s credited with the recruitment of Guion Bluford, the first African-American astronaut; Sally Ride, the first female American astronaut and Mae Jemison, the first black woman to travel to space. 

 “Our space program is our future. We haven’t even begun to begin.” Nichols inspired countless women and people of colour to pursue their dreams and her efforts continue to shape the ever-growing mix of people that are heading to space! 

Written by Michael Darch 

Marie Curie – Coined the Term Radioactive

Radioactivity is the spontaneous emission of radiation caused when an unstable atomic nucleus gives up some energy to make itself more stable. Polish-born Marie Curie conducted pioneering research on radioactivity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and discovered the elements polonium and radium with her husband – the former she named after her heritage.  

In the process she was jointly awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics and became the sole recipient of the 1911 Nobel prize for Chemistry, making her the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the only woman to win the prestigious award in two different fields. 

Curie faced numerous challenges – she had to leave Poland for France to pursue her education, she was initially excluded from becoming a Nobel laureate because she was a woman, and the dedication to her work resulted in long term radiation exposure which ultimately caused her death.  

Exposure to radiation can be lethal, but we find it occurring everywhere – from cosmic rays in outer space to the air we breathe and the earth we walk on. We ingest radioactive substances such as potassium in bananas and Brazil nuts but the small amounts of radiation from these foods pose little risk. 

Curie’s legacy and our improved understanding of radioactivity has meant that humankind now uses radiation in many beneficial ways – from medicinal diagnoses to generating electricity in industry! 

Written by Dhara Patel 

Wally Funk – Lifelong Aspiring Astronaut

At the same time as the Mercury 7 corps were being put through their training to become the first Americans astronauts, a group of women were going through the same tests in secret. These women, known unofficially as the Mercury 13, never got to go to space. But one of them never lost sight of her dream – Mary Wallace ‘Wally’ Funk. 

Funk had a determination few could match. Becoming the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, the first female civilian flight instructor at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and the first female Federal Aviation Agency inspector; Funk knew how to break down barriers.  

This resolve was never displayed better than in her Mercury 13 training. Funk was required to stay in a tank of water, in isolation and complete darkness, for as long as possible. The first American in space, John Glenn, lasted three hours and wasn’t even in the tank (he instead faced the trial in a dark room). Funk was brought out of the water on doctor’s orders ten and a half hours after entering. 

When NASA did start accepting women astronauts, Funk was rejected for her lack of an engineering degree. But she never gave up on her dream, and in 2021 she took her seat on the first crewed flight of New Shepard, becoming (at the time) the oldest ever space traveller at the age of 82. 

Written by Alex Thompson