Supermassive Black Holes
A cosmic journey into the heart of galaxies, co-authored with James Trefil
Right now, you and everything that surrounds you, the entire Earth and the Sun, are moving at a speed of 125 miles per second around the center of the Milky Way, roughly 26,000 light years away. It takes 220 million years to make one trip around the center, and the Sun and its planets have done so 19 times in cosmic history. What lies in the center of our galaxy remained a secret for the millions of years that humans have existed on this planet. Until now. We now have irrefutable evidence that lurking at the center lies a monstrous black hole roughly 4 million times the mass of our Sun. How did we come to learn about the existence of this black hole and measure its mass? It was not an easy journey, and it was one that needed technological advances available only within the past couple of decades to make happen. Today we know that supermassives are found everywhere in the Universe deep in the centers of galaxies. They just don’t sit there, but they can have a tremendous impact on the galaxy in which they reside. Recent JWST observations are finding them very far away, when the universe was only a few hundred million years old.
From the Russian front to the discovery of the Monster at the center of the Galaxy…
Discover the story behind one of the universe’s most enigmatic phenomena—black holes. This book traces their journey from an abstract mathematical curiosity to astronomical reality, beginning with a letter written from the Russian front in World War I. There, in December 1915, the ailing German soldier Karl Schwarzschild sent Einstein the first exact solution to Einstein’s field equations—without ever realizing he was laying the foundation for the idea of a black hole.
Follow the tale as it evolves from a mathematical idea to reality—from Schwarzschild’s equations to the dramatic detection of Cygnus X-1, the first compelling black hole candidate. Along the way, meet Karl Jansky, a radio engineer who, with an antenna rigged atop Ford Model T tires on an abandoned potato field, discovered that mysterious static on telephone lines was not from interference from earth, but radio waves streaming from the center of our galaxy—home to the supermassive black hole in Sagittarius A*.
Follow the journey up to the most recent discoveries with JWST…
Our compressive volume covers supermassive origin theories, quasars and pulsars, gravitational waves, the information paradox, and all of the latest developments and discoveries, including the dramatic discoveries with the James Webb Space Telescope.
