Hey there, Ira here. The Event Horizon Telescope is tackling one of the largest cosmological challenges ever undertaken.

Take a picture of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy using a telescope the size of the Earth.

And now the Event Horizon team has announced they will have big news to share about those efforts on Wednesday, April 10th, where it's anticipated they will show a photo of the Event Horizon.

But before they do, you can brush up on how exactly you photograph a black hole and what this project is all about.

Here's a little primer from our archives, a selection from a conversation

we had with Shep Doliman and Priya Natarajan back in 2016 about that very question.

We're talking this hour about mapping the universe's web of dark matter with Priya Natarajan.

She's a theoretical astrophysicist and professor in the Department

of Physics and Astronomy at Yale, an author of Mapping the Heavens. Really good book to read.

I'd like to bring on another astronomer is also studying something notoriously hard to see, and that is a

black hole. And he has a plan for snapping a close-up of it. He wants

to use a telescope as big as the Earth. No big deal. Shep Dolan is director of the Event Horizon

Telescope Project. He's also an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.

Welcome back to Science Friday.

Thanks, A. Thanks, Aura.

So what's so hard about looking at a black hole that you need a telescope as big as the Earth to take a picture of?

Right. So first of all, black holes are by definition something you can't see.

I like to imagine it as trying to take a picture of a dinosaur.

We know dinosaurs exist. We see their footprints in clay. We see their bones, but no one's ever seen one.

And it's the same with black holes. You can see light bend around them, but you can't see them themselves.

So you have to find a way to build a

telescope that has about 2,000 times the magnifying power of the Hubble Space Telescope,

...