The next generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) — an array of worldwide radio telescopes that converge to create an Earth-sized virtual telescope — is working on creating the first ever moving image of a black hole.

“We want to make dynamical, moving, living, breathing, movies of black holes,” ngEHT leader Shep Doeleman tells Inverse. In 2019, the EHT team, which includes hundreds of “black belt engineers” (as Doeleman describes them), published the first-ever image of a black hole — a snapshot of the churning supermassive black hole called M87*. Three years later, in 2022, EHT photographed another supermassive black hole, this one at the heart of our own Milky Way Galaxy.

Now, researchers want to take this imaging one step farther, by creating a movie of a black hole. This week, researchers working on EHT announced that the network of telescopes can now observe a new higher frequency off 345 gigahertz (GHz), making black hole movie making “within our grasp by the end of this decade,” Doeleman says.

Inverse spoke with Doeleman about the challenges ahead, and why “black hole cinema” matters.

Alien: Romulus is continuing its stunning box office triumph, leaving fans wondering what’s next for the Alien franchise. The answer, of course, is another prequel.

An Alien TV series, Alien: Earth, has just wrapped production under showrunner Noah Hawley, best known for his work on Fargo. But what will Hawley’s Alien: Earth be like, and how will it fill the gaps between the existing prequel films and the rest of the Alien saga? Prometheus and Covenant created a massive mystery about the true origins of the xenomorphs, and the answer to the riddle might be found in a new hint from Hawley that the show could “be the next 10 years” of his life.