A Crack in Everything: How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage – Chown Marcus (2024)

What is space? What is time? Where did the universe come from? The answers to humanity’s most enduring questions may lie in science’s greatest enigma: black holes. A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. This can happen when a star approaches the end of its life and, unable to generate enough heat to maintain its outer layers, collapses catastrophically into an infinitely dense point. When the phenomenon was first proposed in 1916, it seemed so far beyond scientific understanding that Albert Einstein dismissed it as too ridiculous to be true. Scientists have since proved otherwise. In 1971, Paul Murdin and Louise Webster discovered the first black hole, Cygnus X-1. Later, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found that supermassive black holes lie at the heart of almost every galaxy, including our own. On 10 April 2019, a team of astronomers made history by producing the first image of a black hole. This book tells the story of how black holes came in from the cold and took cosmic centre stage. Journalist Marcus Chown interviews many of the scientists behind the key discoveries and, as a former physicist, explains the most esoteric science in everyday language, creating an engaging account of one of modern science’s great untold stories.