eli5 black holes in outer space and how we discovered them and learned about him if we have never been to one
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We see their effects.
That’s basically how we observe most of the stuff in our universe. Up until a few years ago when we managed to take an actual image of a black hole, astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians would observe the sky (not just with their eye but a bunch of tools), and use fancy-ass math prove, discover, and observe. They noticed that some things “should” be there, but when they pointed their telescopes, they saw nothing. That’s what led people to believe that there “must” be something there affecting the other celestial bodies around them. Through more math and tools, they eventually proved black holes’ existence.
I omitted names of who discovered, or who proposed first coz it’s a bit confusing and I’m not very knowledgeable in that aspect.
According to our understanding of physics, black holes are basically a consequence of how gravity affects the universe, and particularly once Einstein published his General Relativity theory, that provided some understanding and equations that let physicists mathematically describe a black hole in some detail.
So black holes were basically a theoretical prediction of General Relativity, but there was still some debate about whether they could really exist, or whether some unknown mechanism would stop them.
Eventually astronomical observations got good enough that astronomers became pretty good at measuring both the size and mass of many distant objects, and started detecting things that are so massive compared to their size that they pretty much had to be black holes. There’s just no other way to pack that much mass into objects that small according to our understanding of physics.
And even more recently, as of a few years ago, astronomers have been able to directly image a black hole, or at least the accretion disk of hot matter swirling around it. It’s a fairly low resolution image since the object is very far away, but what they saw matches very well with the predictions derived from the equations of General Relativity and computer simulations and whatnot of how it should look.
It’s all in the movies… Think about it like this, on one end of a wormhole is Star Wars, but on the other end you get Space Balls
We figured out that there’s no upper limit to mass density, and therefore no upper limit to the potential strength of gravity.
At a certain mass density, gravity pulls in faster than light can travel. Boom. Black hole.
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