ARE BLACK HOLES REAL?

IF SO, WHO DISCOVERED

THEM?
By: Maria Temming at July 22, 2014

Black holes seem to be the stuff of science fiction (and, in fact, have starred
in many sci-fi books and movies), so it's not uncommon for people to wonder, are
Introduction
black holes real? As it turns out, the answer is yes, though for a long time
most scientists were convinced that black holes were purely theoretical objects.

The concept of a black hole was first conceived by an English amateur

astronomer named John Michell in 1783. Michell was laboring under the
Newtonian assumption that light particles had mass. So, using Newton’s equation
for gravity, Michell suggested that if there were an object with 500 times the radius
of the sun, but with the sun’s average density, then its escape velocity would be
faster than the speed of light. A few years later, the French mathematician and
astronomer Simon Pierre Laplace came to a similar conclusion on the question,
are black holes real?

Unfortunately, the speculations of Michell and Laplace were not taken

seriously in the scientific community because there was simply no evidence to
suggest that such exotic objects existed in the universe, or answer are black holes
real? Moreover, Thomas Young’s double slit experiment in 1803 confirmed the
wave nature of light, and it seemed impossible that gravity could have any
influence on massless waves.
Topic
But in 1905, Einstein used the photoelectric effect to demonstrate that light Sentence

is composed of massless particles called photons. Moreover, his theory of general

relativity, published in 1915, proved that gravity could affect these particles even
though they had no mass. According to relativity, the force of gravity results from
massive objects warping the surrounding spacetime (the three spatial dimensions
and time combined in a four-dimensional continuum). Since even massless
particles such as photons should obey the curvature of spacetime, gravity can
indeed influence light.

In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild solved Einstein’s general relativity equations to

determine the radius of an object whose escape velocity would exceed the speed
of light. However, Einstein himself claimed that the possibility of a black hole was
nothing more than a mathematical curiosity—an interesting prediction of general
relativity, but not an accurate depiction of reality. Not until the mid-twentieth
century, when neutron stars were discovered, did astrophysicists begin to seriously
consider whether objects as compact as black holes could actually exist.
 In recent decades, scientists have gathered much observational evidence
for answering the question, "Are black holes real?" As the name suggests, we
cannot see black holes themselves, but we can observe the effect a black hole has
on its environment. As black holes devour the matter around them, this material
forms an accretion disk, which radiates primarily in the X-ray band of the
electromagnetic spectrum.
Conclusion
Furthermore, when black holes occur in multiple star systems, we can
witness their gravitational effects on the visible companion stars. In fact, the first
true black hole candidate, Cygnus X-1, discovered during a 1964 balloon flight due
to its strong X-ray emission, was later recognized as a black hole because of its
gravitational effect on a tightly orbiting massive star. Similarly, the supermassive
black hole in the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, was confirmed by
astronomers monitoring the orbit of star S0-2 (abbreviated S2) over its 15 ½ year
period.

Source:
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/are-black-holes-real/

NAMA: Fahmi Humam Firsada

NIM: 205090301111015