![]() ![]() ![]() The quandary of black holes is that they upend the very laws of classical physics that foretold their existence. While locking in a swarm of clouds of dust around their cores, they feed on neutron stars and other luminary bodies that succumb to their pull. Their immense gravitation creates the shapes of galaxies, and perhaps black holes themselves are the invisible dark energy in the universe. An unshakable belief that a monster supermassive black hole lurked at the center of our own galaxy was only vindicated after more than a decade of work by Nobel-winning physicists Andrea Ghez, Reinhard Genzel, and others.īlack holes exert a strong influence across the cosmos. The mere existence of black holes had been an open question, even until the 1990s-how the oldest and biggest ones could possibly have formed so soon after the big bang was particularly vexing. Nearly 100 years after Albert Einstein predicted their existence, the direct confirmations are rolling in and revolutionizing astrophysics. The past five years have brought a spate of astounding black hole observations: the first detection in 2015 of gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes an unprecedented x-ray look in 2018 at a dozen black holes spinning around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way and the first-ever photo of a black hole (at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy) in 2019. ![]()
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