We need the expertise of IT colleagues to store and send these huge sets of data back to us researchers. To analyse data from these telescopes for the first picture of the black hole for example, we required many types of software, hardware and other IT resources. The software, hardware and infrastructures that IT-colleagues set up were necessary for readily capturing the light and gravitational waves emitted by cosmic explosions, or capturing the first image of a black hole. We wouldn’t have been able to make these groundbreaking discoveries without them.