The day after publication of the Science paper on Swift J1644+57, Ira Flatow interviews Bloom (with Lawrence Krauss) on the gamma-ray outburst interpreted as a supermassive black hole shredding and swallowing a star 3.8 billion light-years away.
12-minute segment; NPR transcript available.
Bloom's segments (condensed): Bloom explains how observations of Swift J1644+57 — its energy, duration, spectrum, and location near the center of a distant galaxy — led to the interpretation of a black hole swallowing a wayward star and beaming a relativistic jet at Earth. He discusses black holes as efficient converters of mass to light, radio follow-up to watch the jet emerge, the ~once-per-million-years-per-galaxy rate of tidal disruptions, the special jet-aligned viewing geometry, and plans to search historical high-energy archives for similar unrecognized events.