Becky Smethurst

This event has been cancelled due to unforeseen personal circumstances. Ticket purchases will be refunded by the TicketSource box office. If you purchased your ticket with a credit for 2020, the credit has been restored to your code.

Astrophysicist and leading science communicator Dr Becky Smethurst explains the real story of black holes and how they contain the answers to the most profound questions of our universe.

Smethurst looks at the scientific breakthroughs that have uncovered the weird and wonderful world of black holes, including the collapse of massive stars and the first photograph of a black hole taken in 2019. She explains why black holes are not really black, what it means to be ‘spaghettified’, and why black holes are more like sofas than hoovers.

Smethurst is an astrophysicist based at the University of Oxford and holder of the Royal Astronomical Society’s Research Fellowship for 2022. Her YouTube channel on space has 400,000 subscribers and her first book, Space: 10 Things You Should Know, was one of the Sky at Night magazine’s top 20 books of 2019.