A black hole with a glowing orange disk of gas, its back half bent up over the top and a thin lensed ring underneath, against a starry sky

The Science of Black Holes: an interactive 3D lesson chapter

The Science of Black Holes, an interactive 3D lesson chapter: what black holes are, how they bend light and slow time, and how we found them and took their picture. Ten short lessons, each built on a real study you redo yourself around one black hole drawn with its light truly bent by gravity: John Michell’s 1783 dark stars, where you squeeze a star until its light can’t escape; Karl Schwarzschild’s 1916 edge, sized for any mass down to an Earth the width of a marble; Cygnus X-1, the first black hole found, weighed from its blue giant partner’s orbit; Eddington’s 1919 eclipse, where you drag a star behind the hole into an Einstein ring; Luminet’s 1979 picture of the disk’s back half lifted over the top; Cunningham and Bardeen’s 1973 bright side; Pound and Rebka’s 1959 slowing clock, with a lamp lowered towards the edge; Ghez and Genzel’s star S2 swinging past the centre of our galaxy in 2018; LIGO’s 2015 merger and its chirp; and the Event Horizon Telescope’s 2019 first photo, made by switching on radio dishes across the Earth. Each lesson has a short guided tour, hands-on tasks and a quiz.

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A black hole with a glowing orange disk of gas, its back half bent up over the top and a thin lensed ring underneath, against a starry sky

Interactive 3D demo

The Science of Black Holes

An interactive lesson chapter on the science of black holes: what they are, how they bend light and slow time, and how we found them, in ten real studies.

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