Episode Details

In the May edition of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester reflects on the biggest astronomy story of the year – the first ever image of a black hole and its “shadow”. Unless you’ve been living in a black hole yourself, you will have seen the glowing donut/eye of Sauron/smiley face, which is actually the supermassive black hole at the centre of the M87 elliptical galaxy, some 55 million light-years from Earth.

The image represents an incredible feat of science and engineering, produced from petabytes of data captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of individual radio telescopes and telescopic arrays scattered across the globe. The EHT team reported the results in six papers in a special issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, which is published by the Institute of Physics on behalf of the American Astronomical Society.

To find out more about the story behind the discovery, Glester catches up with three scientists from the EHT team who also hold positions at Radboud University in the Netherlands. First up is Monika Mościbrodzka, a member of EHT’s data analysis team who speaks about the significance of the discovery and the future prospects for the project. “Black holes are no longer just a theory. It’s now reality”, she says.