How did scientists know about the existance of black holes, how they behave etc… long before getting the very first image of one
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You start out with a fact of reality, mass attracts eachother. No matter if it’s an apple, or the sun, everything that has mass attracts other things that do have mass. But naturally, the larger the mass, the larger the attraction.
And then you observe and do math.
To make the math very simple (but still pretty difficult for a 5 year old), it’s akin to a problem like “2 + X = 5”.
You observe the movement of planets you know of, which is the result “5” in the equation. But when you do the math for the planets you know of, the result is “2”. And 2 is not 5, so there must be an unknown there somewhere. So you reverse your problem, “5 – 2 = X”. You find X, which in this case is 3, and start looking if you find 3 in reality.
If you do, Great! You found out something new about reality. If not, you go a step back again – what else than 3 could X be? It could be (1 + 2), or (2 + 1), or maybe even (1 + 1 + 1). So again, you go back to looking if you can find any of these.
Which is how we first [discovered the planet Neptune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_Neptune), and it’s the same to find black holes without needing to be able to see them, but even more complicated.
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