How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole? | PODCAST: The Joy of Why

Astrophysicist Shep Doeleman explains how capturing the first image of a black hole required a telescope the size of the world, and why the next goal is to create a movie. “The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the cosmologist and author Janna Levin take turns interviewing leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time. For more episodes visit Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/the-joy-of-why/ -------- 00:00 Why black holes fascinate us 03:27 Meet Shep Doeleman 06:44 How we knew black holes existed 11:28 Turning Earth into a telescope 19:24 Building the Event Horizon Telescope 26:19 M87 vs. Sagittarius A* 35:06 Revealing the first black hole image 39:10 Why black holes look like rings 42:55 Making movies of black holes 46:25 What black hole movies could reveal 49:28 Testing alternatives to black holes 53:12 The joy of seeing the invisible --------- Black holes are one of the universe’s most exotic and elusive objects. When nothing, not even light, can escape their powerful gravitational grasp, taking a picture of one seems unimaginable. But an image of a black hole, or more accurately its shadow, could offer insights that theory alone may not provide when testing predictions. So how can it be done? Harvard astrophysicist Shep Doeleman and a team of 250 researchers achieved this extraordinary feat by linking a group of radio telescopes around the world. This network, called the Event Horizon Telescope, produced the first image of a supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87, around 55 million light-years away, and the first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy. In this episode, Doeleman tells co-host Janna Levin how he turned the Earth into a telescope capable of seeing a black hole, the incredible level of science and collaboration that was required to achieve this, how the images have furthered our understanding of these exotic objects, and how movies of black holes may be possible by the early 2030s. --------- "The Joy of Why" is a podcast from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation. Funding decisions by the Simons Foundation have no influence on the selection of topics, guests, or other editorial decisions in this podcast or in Quanta Magazine. "The Joy of Why" is produced by PRX Productions; the production team is Caitlin