How math tells us that something exists in outer space ?

Question

I was watching a video about black holes, and when they mentioned that Einstein proved black holes exist with maths, it hit me.
I’ve never asked myself that question, how do numbers tell you that something exist in outer space and what to expect from it? especially things that we never knew they existed in the first place (exp black/white holes) ?

In: 407

Answer 1

One thing to add to the various explanations.

One of the biggest assumptions (though we can, to some extent, prove it) we make in astronomy and cosmology is that the observable universe is relatively homogenous. What we mean by that is that on Earth, we can experiment with things like physics, chemistry, studying matter or forces like gravity – and we *believe* that those observations, those laws, are the same on Venus, or Callisto, or in the Andromeda Galaxy.

So that means it’s possible for us to experiment with something on Earth, and use that information to predict stuff that we’ve never seen.

Now of course, the universe being homogenous is an assumption; but it’s one that’s borne out by everything we know (for example, we don’t any any evidence that gravity works the opposite way in the Andromedia Galaxy).