There has never been a more exciting time to study one of the most mysterious phenomena in space. This month, The Sky at Night team investigate the science of black holes and discover the incredible techniques being used to uncover their secrets, and even help us answer bigger questions about our universe.\n\nChris meets with Dr Becky Smethurst at the University of Oxford to learn how a black hole forms from the death of a star. He also investigates whether black holes deserve their menacing portrayal in popular culture. He describes what would happen if we got too close to the event horizon and how black holes might actually play a role in lighting up the universe.\n\nMaggie explores how scientists are trying to understand more about black holes by meeting Dr Tessa Baker, who works on LIGO. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory is one of the world’s largest physics experiments and is not your usual type of observatory; instead of looking - it listens. The next observation run has just started, and Maggie learns what they are hoping to find.\n\nChris meets with Dr James Nightingale, who has recently discovered one of the largest black holes in space using brand new computational technology and the age-old technique of gravitational lensing. They explore the relationship between black holes and galaxies, as it is thought that within the centre of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole.\n\nWe visit our in-house stargazing expert, Pete Lawrence, who shows us how to find a black hole in the sky, and Saturn at its brightest and best.\n\nFinally, George Dransfield visits Dr Silke Weinfurtner at her black hole laboratory, where they are simulating features of black holes here on Earth. They use fluid systems to perform experiments to try to determine if phenomena we think occur around black holes could actually happen.\n
Source: BBC 4
Asteroid Strike?
The team explore one of the biggest stories in space news, the ‘city killer’ asteroid 2024 YR4. First observed on 27 December 2024, it soon became one of the biggest ...
17-04-2025
BBC 4
Ancestral Skies
This month, The Sky at Night teams up with BBC Ideas to discover the secrets of archaeology and astronomy and to reflect on our ancestral skies. \n\nThroughout history and acros ...
14-11-2024
BBC 4
Question Time Special
Get ready for The Sky at Night’s annual Question Time Special, where viewers get the opportunity to ask the questions they have always wanted answered about our universe.\ ...
08-10-2024
BBC 4
2075: Our Place In Space
The Sky at Night is embarking on a journey into the future as we explore how space will revolutionise life on Earth over the next 50 years. As humanity's reach extends into the ...
11-09-2024
BBC 4
Nicky, Nasa And The Next Frontier
In this Sky at Night special, the team talk to Dr Nicola Fox, NASA’s head of science, whose life began in the UK.\n\nPresenter Chris Lintott chats to Nicky about her early ...
15-08-2024
BBC 4
Webb Telescope: The Story So Far
In July 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope released its first images. They were visually stunning, and it was clear they provided more detail of stars, galaxies and planets th ...
11-07-2024
BBC 4
Cosmic Ghosts
This month, The Sky at Night has a spooky twist. Across the universe, there are hidden objects that we can’t see, but astronomers and scientists still believe they’r ...
13-06-2024
BBC 4
Hiding In Starlight
Total solar eclipses, like the one seen last month in North America, allow us to see details of the Sun that can’t be seen at any other time. So, this month, The Sky at Ni ...
16-05-2024
BBC 4
Space Rock Return
The Sky at Night is back for a brand new series, and this month it is delving into Nasa’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which last year brought back a sample from the near-Earth ast ...
11-04-2024
BBC 4
Asteroid Strike?
The team explore one of the biggest stories in space news, the ‘city killer’ asteroid 2024 YR4. First observed on 27 December 2024, it soon became one of the biggest ...
17-04-2025
BBC 4
The Sky At Day
The British weather is often the enemy of stargazers up and down the country. A forecast of a couple of hours of cloud cover will disappoint even the most determined amateur ast ...
13-07-2022
BBC 4
Death Star
One evening in early September 1859, a spectacular blood-red aurora borealis appeared across America. Earlier that same day, in a leafy garden in the UK, a gentleman astronomer ...
16-08-2018
BBC 4
Gaia: A Galactic Revolution
For past three and a half years, ESA's Gaia Space telescope has been mapping the heavens in unprecedented detail. At the end of April 2018 it released precise data on over 1.3 b ...
17-05-2018
BBC 4
The Invisible Universe
The Sky at Night reports on one of the most unnerving discoveries in space science - that most of the universe is missing.\n\nWe live in a material world, so instinctively we kn ...
18-01-2018
BBC 4
Guides: 1. Planets
The planets have fascinated us for millennia, but over the past 60 years our understanding of them has been transformed. Using The Sky at Night archives, Maggie Aderin-Pocock ta ...
17-05-2018
BBC 4
In The Blink Of An Eye
We're used to thinking that the universe operates on timescales of millions or even billions of years, where change happens with imperceptible slowness. But now we've discovered ...
16-11-2017
BBC 4
Guides: 2. Galaxies
Galaxies are the building blocks of the universe. Our solar system sits inside a huge galaxy that we call the Milky Way - home to as many as 300 billion stars. But the Milky Way ...
11-08-2019
BBC 4