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  • The Paris Review

    What the Scientists Who Photographed the Black Hole Like to Read

    by Rebekah Frumkin Apr 25, 2019 7 minutes

    On April 10, 2019, an international team of scientists working on a project called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) released an image of a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87). Several years in the making, the image was created from data compiled by a number of telescopes spaced across the planet.

    The EHT team is a large and diverse group, including many early-career Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers from the U.S. and abroad. Rebekah Frumkin spoke to nine of those scientists, all in their twenties or early thirties, about what they like to read, how the black hole is like a work of art, and their advice for writers depicting black holes in their work. 

    (Image: © EHT Collaboration)

    What kind of fiction or poetry do you like to read, and how has it influenced your research?

    Sara Issaoun: I like science fiction, the kind that either drifts toward realism or toward whimsy. I’m a big fan of Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is probably a classic for most astronomers.

    : It is difficult for me to choose a particular genre of fiction, so I’ll just pick a recent favorite: . I find insurmountably evil villains

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