![]() ![]() According to him, big enough stars should be able to collapse under their own gravity and create what we call black holes today.įor decades after this, black holes remained a purely theoretical concept, and the actual term wasn't coined until 1967 by the American astronomer John Wheeler. His theoretical work would prove to be years ahead of his time, with the later groundbreaking work of the great Albert Einstein.Įinstein first predicted that such things should exist way back in 1916 in his "General Theory of Relativity". Mitchell suggested that although these areas would be invisible, they should reveal their presence by interfering with things like stars that might orbit them. In 1783, for example, an English cleric and amateur scientist called John Mitchell managed to demonstrate that Newton's law of gravity could be used to show a place where gravity was so intense light could not escape. That being said, scientists have speculated about the existence of something like them for hundreds of years. Technically speaking, we haven't really "found" a black hole yet, but we can infer their existence through various techniques (more on this later). While everyone has heard of black holes nowadays, have you ever wondered who first discovered them? Supermassive black holes (millions or even billions of solar masses in size) are thought to form at the same time as the galaxy they inhabit is formed and are predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. The Milky Way has a supermassive black hole at its center, Sagittarius A* (pronounced “a star”), that may be more than four million times as massive as our sun. Scientists aren't sure how such large black holes come into being, although there are a number of theories. There may be thousands of these stellar-mass black holes within our own galaxy. If this mass collapses into an infinitely small point, a black hole is born-many times the mass of our own sun. Needless to say, there is little consensus in the field over these types of enigmatic black holes. Others believe that, if they exist, they will form from the collapse of stars with masses equal to hundreds of thousands of solar masses (one solar mass is equal to the mass of our own Sun, or 1.989 × 1030 kg). Some scientists believe that intermediate black holes form from merging miniature black holes. ![]() This type of black hole would have several hundred of thousands of solar masses, rather than millions, or even billions of solar masses, like their larger cousins. Like miniature black holes, intermediate black holes are only really theoretical. To date, these tiny black holes are purely theoretical, and it is theorized that most of them may have already evaporated. These tiny black holes are thought to have masses of hundreds of solar masses or less. To date, scientists have managed to define at least four different kinds of black holes:Ĭurrent theories suggest that small, or miniature, black holes (some as small as an atom) probably formed in the universe's earliest moments. How black holes form depends on their type and origin. Kristof Wesely/Wikimedia Commons What are black holes made of, and what different kinds of them are there?
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