how, if black holes don’t reflect light, how we saw one
In: Physics
You can’t see the black hole itself, but you can see stuff around it. The high gravity makes matter around the black hole spin around it quickly and rip apart, spewing matter out around it. You can also “see” where a black hole is by looking at how the gravity affects other objects near it. Just like our planet travels in a near-circle because of the sun, we can see objects moving in trajectories that couldn’t happen unless there was a nearby black hole.
In the future we may be able to “look at” black holes better by detecting Hawking radiation, but it’s beyond our current capabilities. Black holes naturally “evaporate” and spit out particles, those particles we call Hawking Radiation. The problem is that any reasonably large black hole doesn’t spit out enough for us to detect from such a long distance.
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