From Einstein's doubts to photographs: how black holes became real objects
October 6, 2026 · 17 min read
Andrew Strominger explains why Einstein doubted black holes and what a photon ring reveals, Michelle Thaller describes photographing one, and Brian Cox covers what they do to physics. The story shows how an idea moved from mathematical oddity to something astronomers can observe.
The rules, numbers and steps worth keeping in front of you.
- A black hole is a region of space-time from which light can never escape.
- Schwarzschild found the solution in early 1916; Einstein later argued black holes do not exist.
- Strominger: judge a scientist by the number of things they got right.
- Evidence comes from images, fast-orbiting stars, bright gas disks and gravitational waves.
- Thaller: eight observatories caught the same wavefront to act as one Earth-sized telescope.
- Thaller: the dark part of the image is the shadow of the event horizon, slightly larger than the horizon.
- Cox: the bright ring is light from a flat disk, bent around the hole as Einstein's theory predicts.
- Cox: the black hole in M87 is about six billion times the mass of the sun.
- Thaller: every major galaxy has a big black hole at its center.
- Strominger: the image mostly shows hot matter; the photon ring would reveal the hole's geometry and spin.
- All three: Einstein's equations blow up at the singularity; the inside is not understood.
- Cox: physicists are pretty sure information is not destroyed, but lack the physical picture.
- Cox: black holes are pushing physics toward space and time not being fundamental.
- How supermassive black holes formed so early is still unknown.
This is the short form. The full insight has every expert's reasoning, their own words and the sources.