Black hole
astronomical object so massive, that anything falling into it, including light, cannot escape its gravity
A black hole is an astronomical body so compact that its gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes gravitation as the curvature of spacetime, predicts that any sufficiently compact mass will form a black hole. The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. In general relativity, crossing a black hole's event horizon traps an object inside but produces no locally detectable change. General relativity also predicts that every black hole should have a central singularity, where the curvature of spacetime is infinite.
Objects whose gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century. In 1916, the first solution of general relativity that would characterise a black hole was found. By the late 1950s, this solution began to be interpreted physically as a region of space from which nothing can escape. Black holes were long considered a mathematical curiosity; it was not until the 1960s that theoretical work showed they were a generic prediction of general relativity. The first widely accepted black hole was Cygnus X-1, an x-ray source proposed as a black hole binary through several studies between 1971 and 1974.
The public source identifies “Black hole” as astronomical object so massive, that anything falling into it, including light, cannot escape its gravity. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Black, hole and astronomical.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q589. The Library of Congress control number is sh85014574. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1916, 1971 and 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Black hole” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.