In the depths of the universe for man lurks countless mysteries and secrets. One of them are black holes - objects that even the greatest minds of mankind cannot understand. Hundreds of astrophysicists are trying to uncover the nature of black holes, but at this stage we have not even proved their existence in practice.
Filmmakers dedicate their films to them, and among ordinary people black holes have become so cult phenomenon that they are identified with the end of the world and inevitable death. They are feared and hated, but at the same time they idolize them and bow down before the unknown that these strange fragments of the Universe conceal in themselves. Agree, to be absorbed by a black hole - that is still a romantic. With their help, you can travel in time, and they can also be for us guides to other worlds.
The popularity of black holes is often speculated by the yellow press. Finding headlines in newspapers, connected with the end of the world on the planet due to another collision with a supermassive black hole, is not a problem. Much worse is the fact that the illiterate part of the population takes everything seriously and raises a real panic. To bring a bit of clarity, we will go on a journey to the origins of the discovery of black holes and try to understand what it is and how to treat it.
Invisible stars
It so happened that modern physicists describe the structure of our Universe using the theory of relativity, which Einstein thoughtfully provided to humanity in the early 20th century. All the more mysterious are the black holes, on the horizon of events of which all the laws of physics known to us and Einstein's theory cease to operate, including. Isn't that great? In addition, a hunch about the existence of black holes was expressed long before the birth of Einstein himself.
In 1783 in England there was a significant increase in scientific activity. In those days, science went side by side with religion, they got along well together, and scientists were no longer considered heretics. Moreover, the priests were engaged in scientific research. One of these ministers of God was English pastor John Michelle, who asked himself not only questions of being, but also quite scientific tasks. Michell was a highly titled scholar: he was originally a teacher of mathematics and ancient linguistics at a college, and after that for a series of discoveries he was accepted into the Royal Society of London.
John Michell dealt with seismology, but at leisure he liked to think about the eternal and the cosmos. So he had the idea that somewhere in the depths of the Universe supermassive bodies could exist with such powerful gravity that to overcome the force of such a body, it is necessary to move at a speed equal to or higher than the speed of light. If we accept such a theory as true, then even the light cannot develop the second cosmic velocity (the speed necessary to overcome the gravitational pull of the body), therefore such a body will remain invisible to the naked eye.
Michelle called his new theory "dark stars", and at the same time tried to calculate the mass of such objects. He expressed his thoughts on this in an open letter to the Royal Society of London. Unfortunately, in those days such surveys were not of particular value to science, so Michell's letter was sent to the archive. Only two hundred years later, in the second half of the 20th century, was it possible to find it among thousands of other records, carefully preserved in the ancient library.
The first scientific rationales for the existence of black holes
After the release of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, mathematics and physics seriously took up the solution of the equations presented by the German scientist, which were supposed to tell us a lot about the structure of the Universe. The German astronomer, physicist Karl Schwarzschild in 1916 decided to do the same.
