It took 200 years to search out black holes, however now we all know they have to be ubiquitous.
This simulated view of a black hole reveals how our view of the accretion disk is warped by the black hole’s gravity. Credit score: NASA’s Goddard Area Flight Heart/Jeremy Schnittman
Even a short historical past of black holes must return to 1783, when the English pure thinker John Michell mused {that a} star might be so dense that its escape velocity was bigger than the velocity of sunshine.
But it surely took over two centuries to search out proof. The time period “black hole” itself wasn’t coined till 1967 by the American physicist John Wheeler. And the primary candidate object broadly accepted to be a black hole got here within the type of Cygnus X-1, an X-ray supply found in 1971.
This week, Dave breaks down the classes of black holes recognized right this moment — and the way we all know that there have to be thousands and thousands of them on the market, even when they’re evading our detection, for now.
