What Was The First Black Hole?

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As an german I find it imennsly entertaining, that an guy called Schwarzschild calculated the no return area and it's named after him, because "Schwarzschild" in german means "black shield". Untill I learned the no return border was named after an person I thought it was an term coined by an scientist because it's just fitting, just like the term "black hole"

Yesss! Nice... I'm chronically ill and don't have much to look forward to in life. Your wonderful series helps me get my mind off of the gruelling pain and be at ease for a while. Thank you

Karl Schwarzschild has always fascinated me. He’s on the front lines of the war and when he’s not fighting, he chooses to derive field equations for Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. He survives the war only to die of a skin disease. Dude was fascinating to me.

Wow! This video is awesome and it's an honor that you used my images. Thanks for taking the time to mention my full name in the description. Keep it up!

That was the best and most terrifying description of falling into a black hole I’ve ever head and I’ve heard many.

Eight days after John Wheeler's fateful lecture, the Star Trek episode "Tomorrow is Yesterday" aired, where the concept showed the starship traveling backward in time upon escaping an encounter with a superdense "black star". Star Trek came very close to naming the phenomenon we know as a black hole!

Your description of Karl Schwarzschild in those terrible trenches, receiving an envelope from his friend was a wonderful and evocative passage! Elegantly written and narrated and, blessedly, without political observations. Pure science and science history. Thank you so much, History of the Universe and Leila Battison.

Holy crap!! I've seen a hefty amount of black hole documentaries, but this one takes my #1 spot! The narration, visuals, and music all come together so well, this is amazing!

Your team have really improved, the flow, content and overall depth is really really good! It makes for really great viewing, I look forward to more uploads to the history of the earth channel as well! Please keep up the uploads, if there is a way to support you guys directly like patreon to get more uploads on this channel and history of the earth channel make available to the subscribers. You narration skills have really really improved David! Well done and I continue to look forward to more uploads’

It’s so nicely narrated that I often just listen to it when I go to sleep. My thoughts are then somewhere between the stars. But the first time I always watch it in full :) thanks for that great content and quality!

Hey David, just want to thank you guys for these videos. I could genuinely see this series on Netflix but I'm happy it's here on YouTube. I deal with anxiety and trouble sleeping without something to fall asleep to some times, so I have watched all these videos multiple times. There's something really soothing about hearing you talk about history and cover topics in these videos and falling asleep to have crazy dreams of outer space and other planets/stars. Keep up the good work you guys :)

In the past month or two, I've had quite the challenge of finding a video on astronomy that's not only put together really well but also informative and captivating. I found this for the first time today and watched it. It's unequivocally nothing short of amazing! I wholeheartedly appreciate the amount of time and effort that was put into this. THANK YOU for delivering such quality content.

Always a surprise when they drop. Absolutely makes my week when you guys post a new video. Best thing on YouTube. Amazing work.

i've gotta say i love how your videos can transition from cosmic physics to down to earth history in such a flawless way, quite excellent

"Isaac Newton rarely went to sleep before 3:00am. It worked for him but it won't work for you." I felt that.

'Incomprehensible Horror' -- Without a doubt, my favorite description of a black hole.

this channel deserves more recognition! every single video is worthy of praise for the detailed explanation and history behind it.

Doing amateur astronomy and astrophotography as a hobby, have plans of imaging SH2-101 and was showing my friends the shockwave from Cyg X-1 that we can image as well. And here you are same day dropping a video on black holes lmao! Excellent watch, your content is always a treat :)

Summary: INTRODUCTION - A black hole can usually be found with an accretion disk surrounding it. This disk contains fast-moving gas, dust and debris significantly heated by friction and lensed into a halo by the superior gravitational pull of the black hole (the intense gravity of the black hole quite literally pulls the light from the accretion travelling behind the black hole up and over its horizon - you can see the back side of the black hole from the front because the lensing is so intense). - The frictional heating also radiates intense X-rays and Gamma Rays. As you enter the event horizon, you can start to experience extreme tidal forces (aka spaghettification). - It is usually thought that most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at its centre. THE FIRST BLACK HOLE - 1915, Schwarzschild has just received a description of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. A few days later, he gives the first metric solution to his theory. Most importantly, his theory predicts the existence of black holes, more specifically, Schwarzschild is able to define something called the "Schwarzschild radius" which implies the density at which a given becomes a black hole, the radius being the event horizon. - The radius depends only on the gravitational constant, the speed of light and the given mass available (the Earth's Schwarzschild radius is only 9 mm). - 1964, a geiger counter strapped to a rocket travelling outside the earth's atmosphere picked up X-rays from within the Cygnus constellation which was later realised to be the proof of black holes. The object they saw turned out to be smaller than a start but 15x more massive from further analysis. - 1967, the name "black hole" wasn't coined until this year when, during a John Wheeler lecture on the then unnamed phenomena, an audience member suggested he use this name instead of having to describe the "gravitationally completely collapsed object" every damn time. - The common formation of black holes is through the supernovae of stars 3 times larger than our sun. As the star reaches the end of its life unable to continue fusion, gravity wins and the star collapses. Once the star collapses there is no known force in nature which can stop this collapse for such a big stellar object, and so it never stops collapsing, so to speak. SUPERMASSIVE - 10th April 2019, the first image of a black hole was released. Turns out a big enough black hole with a large enough accretion disk produces just enough light to be captured by a radio telescope - a galaxy central supermassive black hole was needed. - Sagittarius A*, the central supermassive black hole of our galaxy was a good candidate but it's too close making the adjustments needed more frequent and strenuous and half the milkyway would be in the way. A further but bigger black hole was chosen instead - Sag. A* was only 25K light yrs away with 4M solar masses, but the chosen black hole, M87, was 55M light yrs away with 6.5B solar masses. - A satellite the size of the earth was required: the Event Horizon Telescope. A collaboration of multiple different massive radio telescopes scattered across the world from Spain the South Pole all synchronised by atomic clocks. The resolution was 4000x the Hubble Telescope, a 4 day scan was required and the volume of data used had to be transported physically since it was too large for the internet bandwidth - it took two whole years of data processing after the data was collected in 2017. - A second image was then released in May 2022 after 3 more years of data processing. - Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe, and at the centre of them are not supermassive black holes, but ULTRA-massive black holes, one of the biggest ones having 66 Billlion solar masses, which is more massive than our milkyway. Naturally it's accretion disk reaches ridiculous speeds - a fifth of light speed - which leads to a luminosity that outshines its own galaxy. - Most galaxies do have at least a supermassive black hole at their centre, in fact a question often asked is whether these black holes formed the galaxies, or if the galaxies formed these black holes? - Many supermassive black holes date back to only a few million years after the big bang which shouldn't be possible. This puzzle alone gives us a large hint that there may not be just one way for black holes to form. BEFORE ATOMS - In 1966, Stephen Hawking wrote his doctoral thesis helping prove the validity of the big bang theory, all while his motor neuron disease continued to develop. Later he proposed the idea of Hawking radiation, a semiclassical idea noting the clash between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity that most likely existed at the event horizon border. - In 1971 he then also suggested the existence of primordial black holes which formed from the big bang itself. After the Universe is born and the universe cools to allow the first subatomic particles (quarks & leptons) the Universe is then theorised to under cosmic inflation where the universe doubles ~90 times in a hundred billionth of a second turning quantum fluctuations into cosmic inhomogeneity that is however barely observable to us for the most part. - It can be said that while the Universe is only *one second old*, that during cosmic inflation these quantum fluctuations coupled with the uneven distribution of subatomic particles could have opened up the chance for the spontaneous creation of gravitational singularities. and the later that these collapses happened the larger the black hole would be (giving a full range of possible micro sized black hole to all the way up to supermassive black holes). These promidal objects could then have ample time to grow into what we observe today. - Unfortunatey, Stephen Hawking's theories are known for being mathematically watertight but hard to prove or falsify FINDING THE NEEDLE - In 1951, Gerard Kuiper deduced that an asteroid belt he called the Kuiper belt should exist beyond the orbit of Neptune in order to explain the current persistent existence of short-period comets, acting sort of as a nursery of icy bodies of which some bodies end up getting knocked out of the belt from time to time. Evidence for this asteroid belt was found in 1992. - Later on, very unusual trans-neptunian orbits were being found orbiting the sun, the main quirk being that these orbits were all distributed to one side of the solar system at a very esoteric angle to the equatorial plane. - 2012, Rodney Gomes suggested a hypothetical planet existed to cause this off balanced distribution of trans-neptunian orbits however no evidence suggests as such. It could be argued instead that Planet Nine is in fact primordial black hole the size of a tennis ball. Such an object would instead be emitting radiation from any possible dark matter halo it may have and so we may use this as evidence for its possible existence. - In order to assert, however, that such a black hole would have a dark matter halo you would of course have to know what dark matter is. - Two possible ideas: WIMPs - Weakly Interacting Massive Particles; or MACHOs - Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects. - Hawking believed primordial black holes to be a good candidate for dark matter, specifically as a MACHO. The amount of primordials that could be produced during inflation is enough to outnumber regular matter meaning it could make up some if not all of dark matter. These primordials would then be the pricks in spacetime keeping galaxies in check as its dark matter halo. - Any black hole could supposedly be detected by its gamma ray emissions from hawking radiation. Unfortunately, little to no gamma ray emissions have been observed thus far, therefore primordials could only make up at most 1% of dark matter. - Overall, as of now, the many observations being made of the universe right now have severely limited the range of sizes for the primordials (restrictions come from things such as minimal scarring in the CMB, an abundance of neutron stars, the failure of gamma ray and optical astronomy etc.) - On the plus side, LIGO's detection of gravitational waves since 2015 have given some counter evidence that supports the possibility of primordials. If most primordials end up having a similar mass, then this would fit the data received by LIGO very well. - In the end, black holes can tell us a lot about the early universe and the evolution of galaxies and ultimately the entire universe.