Black Holes 101

You may have learned that black holes are bizarre cosmic objects whose gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape them. And although you might guess that Einstein came up with the concept of black holes, the idea can be traced back to the late 1700s.

But Einstein did develop the notion that three-dimensional space and time are part of a single framework to describe the known universe and how black holes shape it. More recently, gravity-wave “observatories” have detected the ripples in spacetime created when two of these objects collide, and we’ve even managed to glimpse silhouettes of the most massive black holes known.

Kelly Beatty, senior editor at Sky & Telescope magazine, discusses how cosmologists still grapple with precisely what black holes are and how best to study them.

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