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Physics Black Holes Evolution Home How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole? Comment Save Article Read Later Share Facebook Copied! Copy link Email Pocket Reddit Ycombinator Comment Comments Save Article Read Later Read Later The Joy of Why How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole? By Janna Levin and Steven Strogatz October 29, 2026
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astronomy astrophysics black holes cosmology galaxies telescopes The Joy of Why All topics 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.
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Your browser does not support the audio element. 00:00 / 59:46 APPLE SPOTIFY Transcript JANNA LEVIN: Okay. I’m Janna Levin
STROGATZ: A podcast from Quanta Magazine where we look at some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today.
LEVIN: Great to see you. I’m pretty excited about this one. I cannot deny or hide it. We’re talking about not only an area where I’ve spent a lot of my life black holes — the greatest, strangest topic out there — but also I had a chance to talk to an old friend. So it’s a fun episode, I hope.