Astronomy

A brief history of black holes

The foundation for what we know about black holes came during the Great War. Imagine the scene: December 1915. Europe and the world are struggling under the dark cloud of World War I. Somewhere on the ...
Astronomy

Oct. 9, 1873: The birth of Karl Schwarzschild

Karl Schwarzschild, a child prodigy born in 1873, published on celestial mechanics by age 16 and earned his doctorate in astronomy in 1896. His career trajectory included directorships at the ...
Smithsonian Magazine

The Man Who Helped Predict Black Holes, Both Real and Hypothetical

A new book demystifies black holes and explores what we still don’t know about them James Trefil and Shobita Satyapal The first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of ...
The Next Web

Black holes: what we think we know, we don’t

It took Albert Einstein 10 years to find the equations of general relativity, but German astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild only needed a few months to solve them. Schwarzschild’s solution describes ...
Quanta Magazine

Black Hole Singularities Are as Inescapable as Expected

For the first time, physicists have calculated exactly what kind of singularity lies at the center of a realistic black hole. In January 1916, Karl Schwarzschild, a German physicist who was stationed ...