Timeline of black hole physics

Timeline of black hole physics

Pre-20th century

20th century

Before 1960s

1960s

After 1960s

  • 1972 — Identification of Cygnus X-1/HDE 226868 from dynamic observations as the first binary with a stellar black hole candidate
  • 1972 Stephen Hawking proves that the area of a classical black hole's event horizon cannot decrease
  • 1972 James Bardeen, Brandon Carter, and Stephen Hawking propose four laws of black hole mechanics in analogy with the laws of thermodynamics
  • 1972 Jacob Bekenstein suggests that black holes have an entropy proportional to their surface area due to information loss effects
  • 1974 Stephen Hawking applies quantum field theory to black hole spacetimes and shows that black holes will radiate particles with a black-body spectrum which can cause black hole evaporation
  • 1975 James Bardeen and Jacobus Petterson show that the swirl of spacetime around a spinning black hole can act as a gyroscope stabilizing the orientation of the accretion disc and jets[1]
  • 1989 — Identification of microquasar V404 Cygni as a binary black hole candidate system
  • 1994 Charles Townes and colleagues observe ionized neon gas swirling around the center of our Galaxy at such high velocities that a possible black hole mass at the very center must be approximately equal to that of 3 million suns[3]

21st century

  • 2002 — Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics present evidence for the hypothesis that Sagittarius A* is a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy
  • 2002 — Physicists at of The Ohio State University publish fuzzball theory, which is a quantum description of black holes positing that they are extended objects composed of strings and don't have singularities.
  • 2002 — NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory identifies double galactic black holes system in merging galaxies NGC 6240
  • 2004 — Further observations by a team from UCLA present even stronger evidence supporting Sagittarius A* as a black hole
  • 2006 — The Event Horizon Telescope begins capturing data
  • 2012 — First visual evidence of black-holes: Suvi Gezari's team in Johns Hopkins University, using the Hawaiian telescope Pan-STARRS 1, publish images of a supermassive black hole 2.7 million light-years away swallowing a red giant[4]
  • 2015 — LIGO Scientific Collaboration detects the distinctive gravitational waveforms from a binary black hole merging into a final black hole, yielding the basic parameters (e.g., distance, mass, and spin) of the three spinning black holes involved
  • 2019 Event Horizon Telescope collaboration releases the first direct photo of a black hole, the supermassive M87* at the core of the Messier 87 galaxy

References

  1. Thorne, Kip S. (1994). Black holes and time warps : Einstein's outrageous legacy. New York. ISBN 0393035050. OCLC 28147932.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  2. Ferrarese, Laura; Ford, Holland (February 2005). "Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei: Past, Present and Future Research". Space Science Reviews. 116 (3–4): 523–624. arXiv:astro-ph/0411247. Bibcode:2005SSRv..116..523F. doi:10.1007/s11214-005-3947-6. S2CID 119091861. it is fair to say that the single most influential event contributing to the acceptance of black holes was the 1967 discovery of pulsars by graduate student Jocelyn Bell. The clear evidence of the existence of neutron stars – which had been viewed with much skepticism until then – combined with the presence of a critical mass above which stability cannot be achieved, made the existence of stellar-mass black holes inescapable.
  3. Genzel, R; Hollenbach, D; Townes, C H (1994-05-01). "The nucleus of our Galaxy". Reports on Progress in Physics. 57 (5): 417–479. Bibcode:1994RPPh...57..417G. doi:10.1088/0034-4885/57/5/001. ISSN 0034-4885. S2CID 250900662.
  4. Scientific American – Big Gulp: Flaring Galaxy Marks the Messy Demise of a Star in a Supermassive Black Hole

See also

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