Dark Wonders: How Black Holes Shape the Cosmos

The concept of black holes began to take shape in the early 20th century, following Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. In 1915, Einstein proposed that massive objects warp the fabric of spacetime, influencing the motion of other objects. This groundbreaking idea led to the prediction of phenomena such as gravitational waves and, crucially, black holes. The term "black hole" was coined much later, in 1967 by physicist John Archibald Wheeler, but the theoretical underpinnings were already in place.
The first solutions to Einstein's equations that suggested the existence of black holes came from the work of Karl Schwarzschild, who identified a solution representing a spherical, non-rotating black hole, now known as the Schwarzschild black hole.