Episode Synopsis "Cosmic Giants: Capturing a Black Hole"
In 2019, the Event Horizon Project, led by astrophysicist and UMass dad Shep Doeleman, captured the very first picture of a black hole, a behemoth 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun and located more than 55 million lightyears away — galaxy giant Messier 87's gravitational center. Doeleman joined Humans in 2021 to celebrate the two year anniversary of the unprecedented image, to chart the years of research that led to its capture, and to forecast the next discoveries and frontiers in the study of supermassive black holes. This episode first aired in April, 2021. This episode was produced and reported by Rebeca Pereira.