Eighty-five years ago, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder revolutionized understanding of the universe with their groundbreaking paper on black holes.
Yet, despite significant advancements, black holes continue to baffle scientists, leaving many questions unanswered.
Professor Nils Andersson, an expert on astrophysics and black holes, reflects on the importance of Oppenheimer's findings..
"The paper was remarkable, and its abstract could almost be written today, as very little has changed," he noted.
The Oppenheimer-Snyder model, published in 1939, laid the foundation for our understanding of black holes.
However, it wasn't until the 1960s, with the advent of x-ray astronomy, that the significance of their work became apparent.
Einstein first predicted the existence of black holes in 1916, but the term "black hole" wasn't coined until 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler.
Since then, scientists have made significant discoveries, including the first-ever image of a black hole captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2019.
The same black hole was later imaged in polarized light in 2021, revealing magnetized rings.
Andersson noted that these discoveries have strengthened our understanding of black holes, which are now known to be common, with an estimated 10 million to one billion in the Milky Way alone.
Despite this progress, much remains unknown.
Theories suggest that falling into a black hole would be a fatal experience, with some proposing that you would be stretched out like spaghetti, while others predict instant death due to quantum effects.
