this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
22 points (100.0% liked)

Wikipedia

3374 readers
168 users here now

A place to share interesting articles from Wikipedia.

Rules:

Recommended:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Carrolade@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

We often find a black hole because other things we can see are orbiting a patch of nothing. Based on the orbits we can calculate how heavy the thing they should be orbiting is.

A black hole that doesn't have anything visibly in orbit around it would be much harder to find, since it'd just appear to be a patch of nothing with nothing around it--which describes most of outer space to begin with. Though we could still spot one based on how it bends the light coming from things roughly behind it.