Question: Have you found black holes yet?

Alexander Burke answered on 2 Mar 2018:

Yes! We have found black holes recently (we are 99% sure they were black holes). This is going to sound a little complicated but I’ll explain each part.

First of all, a black hole is a region in space where nothing, not even light, can escape. They are the most extreme and destructive objects in the universe (in my opinion).

On the 14th of September, 2015, we observed a gravitational wave (a ripple in the fabric of our universe) which was created from two black holes collided. Think of our universe like an ocean of water with loads of little bits (fish, plants and stuff) contained within that ocean. If you throw a little pebble into the water, you’ll see little ripples of water which will likely die out after a few meters. Now throw a huge boulder into the water, the waves get more intense and will travel much further. This is, pretty much, identical to what happens in our universe, we call these ripples of our universe gravitational waves!

When two very compact and extreme astrophysical objects (such as black holes) collide, they distort the space around them (like the distortion in the ocean). Scientists were able to measure how they distorted the space around the black holes which was really cool! This gave pretty direct evidence that black holes exist in our universe =).