How We Know Black Holes Exist

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Space Telescope Science Institute for supporting this video.

This video is about the astronomical amount of astronomical evidence for black holes, ranging from x-ray binaries with accretion disks, supermassive infrared-radiating galactic nuclei black holes, orbital characteristics of high mass binaries, and direct gravitational wave detection of inspiraling merging black hole binaries with LIGO. Yes, they're real.

REFERENCES

Interactive: Masses in the Stellar Graveyard https://ligo.northwestern.edu/media/mass-plot/index.html

Galactic Center Orbital Models and Inner Stellar Distributions

Data provided by Andrea Ghez and Sylvana Yelda, UCLA (obtained with the Keck Telescopes)

Visualization by Stuart Levy and Robert Patterson, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/astrophysics/galactic-center-orbital-models-and-inner-stellar-distributions

Masses of observed black Holes:

https://stellarcollapse.org/bhmasses

Downloadable LIGO Data: https://losc.ligo.org/events/GW170817/

LIGO Neutron Star Binary Merger: http://www.astronomy.com/news/2017/10/ligo-detects-a-neutron-star-merger

Masses of observed neutron stars: https://stellarcollapse.org/nsmasses

Cygnus X-1 X-ray binary Black Hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_X-1#Star_system

Lecture notes on black holes: http://eagle.phys.utk.edu/guidry/astro616/lectures/lecture_ch18.pdf

Calvera isolated neutron star X-ray source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvera_(X-ray_source)

Scientific American: pulsar that behaves like a black hole

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/black-hole-pretenders-may-be-superfast-spinning-pulsars/

Largest known neutron star: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_J0348%2B0432

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=PSR+J0348%2B0432

Large Neutron Star: https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.0024

Wandering Black Hole: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/x-ray-telescopes-find-evidence-for-wandering-black-hole.html

Sagittarius A* Black Hole Infrared emissions: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0911.4659.pdf

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Created by Henry Reich