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We swung the black hole, and it survived it
Physicists have solved one of the most important unsolved puzzles of the mathematical theory of relativity. Some see it as a milestone in its development.
Few terms invented by physicists have had as great a career as “black hole.” The term, coined in the mid-1960s by American physicist John A. Wheeler, describes a region of space-time into which one can fall and into which one can no longer escape. Wheeler, describes a region of space-time into which one can fall, and from which one can no longer get out. Another version claims that a few years earlier, American physicist Robert Dicke physicist used a comparison of these areas to the Black Hole of Calcutta — a prison from which, according to legend, no one has come out alive.
Over the past decade, black holes have featured heavily in news reports. In 2015, the LIGO/Virgo team first observed gravitational waves created by the merging of two supermassive black holes (the discovery was honored with a Nobel Prize in 2017). Three years later, black holes came to Stockholm again, this time to celebrate the observational confirmation of the existence of a large object of this kind at the center of our galaxy. And quite recently, pictures of black holes taken by the Event Horizon Telescope made headlines around the world.
