Since black holes first captivated the public imagination decades ago, they have garnered a certain reputation. They are labeled monstrous, destructive, bent on devouring anything that dares approach their cosmic maw. But without them, the cosmos, and our own planet, would be less dense with wonder.
Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. Wilson showed the trails atoms made as they plunged through water vapor, suddenly it was vividly clear that these were real, not just useful fictions. Again, theory had to have it. Now, for the first time, the black hole is visible, real to us in a way that, when I saw it first take form on the computer screen 10 months ago, knocked me back on my heels.
It still does. There it is , right there, the most extreme distortion of space and time imaginable, with a mass six billion times that of the sun, 53 million light years away. Relativity, defying its name, is true for all of us. Maybe my memory of that particular board is so crisp precisely because that moment defines the cusp between before and after acquiring relativity. Now I cannot imagine my own mind without it. Relativity permeates my thoughts so that I think in relativity the way writers think in their natural language.
Since that time at MIT, Shep and I have both found our way via relativity to the most remarkable of its predictions, black holes. Black holes were conceived of as a thought experiment, a fantastical imagining. Imagine matter crushed to a point. Just imagine that. Schwarzschild inferred that space-time effectively spills toward the crushed center. Racing at its absolute speed, even light gets dragged down the hole, casting a shadow on the sky.
That shadow is the event horizon, the stark demarcation between the outside and anything with the misfortune to have fallen inside. Einstein thought nature would protect us from the formation of black holes. To the contrary, nature makes them in abundance. The event horizon is left behind as an archaeological record while the stellar material continues to fall inward to an unknown fate.
In our own Milky Way galaxy there could be billions of black holes. Supermassive black holes, millions or even billions of times the mass of the sun, anchor the centers of nearly all galaxies, though nobody yet knows how they formed or got so heavy. Maybe they formed from dead stars that merged and escalated in size, or maybe they directly collapsed out of more primordial material in a younger universe.
However they formed, there are as many supermassive black holes as there are galaxies — hundreds of billions in the observable universe. Beginner I have only one question about black holes, why are we studying them and how are they going to benifit mankind in any way. Similar Questions that might Interest You Do supermassive black holes cause galaxy rotation? Advanced How do gravitons escape black holes to tell the universe about their gravity?
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Intermediate How do we know what we observe is x light years away?
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