Is there a specific observation that enabled astronomers to say black holes definitely exist? I think people don't realise the centuries and decades worth of research that went into figuring all of this out. That’s when this idea really came into the forefront of proper theoretical physicists’ minds.īut I'm an observer, you know, I'm like “give me a telescope - I want to actually observe these things.”Īnd most people through the 1970s thought “okay, you've shown the maths is right, but how are we going to find one of these things? Are you sure they're really real?”Īnd the book really goes into that observational hunt for proof. It was all hypothetical, it was all mathematical.Īnd it wasn't until the likes of Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose in the late 1960s proved that actually these things would be inevitable in nature, the idea of a collapse-down to something so massive with this singularity from which even light couldn't escape. Even Schwarzschild who wrote letters with Einstein through World War Two as well, solving his equations in spherical coordinates so that you almost get solutions for black holes, never even realised what he'd found, or even that it was something that was real. When Einstein came up with general relativity as a way of explaining gravity as mass curving space, he was just trying to solve problems like why Mercury's orbit is strange, why we can't always predict it with Newton's gravity.Īnd he never even considered the concept of a black hole. He was a priest by day, an astronomer by night, one of those classic figures of early science!Īnd he came up with the idea of an object so dense that light couldn't escape it. So while the history can really illuminate where the idea of black holes comes from and why we think some things and why we don't think others, it also allows us to reveal what’s still left for us to discover.Įinstein's theory of general relativity explained how mass curves space-time, but did he actually come up with the idea of black holes? Credit: Bettmann / Getty Images It's surprising, to hear that the idea of black holes goes back to the 1700s! This is one of the reasons why our knowledge of black holes is still quite young, and there's still so much we don't know. It's good for us on Earth that x-ray light it doesn't reach the surface! We’re quite thankful for that.īut if you're an x-ray astronomer, it's frustrating because it means if you want to observe the sky in x-rays, you need to send a satellite above the atmosphere. That goes way back to the 1700s, which I think always surprises people, that that's how long ago we're talking about.Īnd then through the ideas of Einstein's theory of general relativity, explaining how Einstein never even thought black holes existed, which I think again surprises a lot of people.Īnd then through the work of radio astronomy and x-ray astronomy coming into the fore after World War Two, when technology had massively improved and we had the ability to send satellites into space as well. That's where I started: where did the first ideas of black holes come from? So I think it was easy in that respect because where you start is the point when we knew nothing about them at all and the idea of a black hole wasn't even a blink in anybody's eye. When writing the book, did you think “where do I start?!”Ī little bit, yeah, but I think the main guiding force for this whole book was that it was looking at our history of understanding of black holes: where the idea comes from, how we even figured out that they exist in the first place, our first observations of them building up to what we know now and what we still don't know. Take a star and collapse it down, squish it down until it’s so dense that you're no longer getting any light from it at all. We describe a black hole simply as an object that is so dense that not even light travelling at 300,000 km a second has enough speed to escape it, because the gravitational pull is so strong.Īnd I like to describe them as more like a dark star than a hole. I think if I could change anything in all of physics, it would probably be the name for a black hole, because I think it has led to so many misconceptions! Listen to this interview as a podcast: What is a black hole? We got the chance to chat to Becky about her new book, black holes, and what we've yet to learn. Her latest book, A Brief History of Black Holes, dispels some of the biggest myths surrounding these cosmic behemoths, and provides a look at humanity's relationship with them, from the first theories that proposed such an object could exist, through Einstein's relativity and up to the present day, with the Event Horizon Telescope's images of the black hole in galaxy M87 and the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
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