Density
The density, or more the volumetric mass density, of a substance is its mass per unit volume. The symbol most used for density is ρ, although the Latin letter D can be used. Mathematically, density is defined as mass divided by volume: ρ = m V where ρ is the density, m is the mass, V is the volume. In some cases, density is loosely defined as its weight per unit volume, although this is scientifically inaccurate – this quantity is more called specific weight. For a pure substance the density has the same numerical value as its mass concentration. Different materials have different densities, density may be relevant to buoyancy and packaging. Osmium and iridium are the densest known elements at standard conditions for temperature and pressure but certain chemical compounds may be denser. To simplify comparisons of density across different systems of units, it is sometimes replaced by the dimensionless quantity "relative density" or "specific gravity", i.e. the ratio of the density of the material to that of a standard material water.
Thus a relative density less than one means. The density of a material varies with pressure; this variation is small for solids and liquids but much greater for gases. Increasing the pressure on an object decreases the volume of the object and thus increases its density. Increasing the temperature of a substance decreases its density by increasing its volume. In most materials, heating the bottom of a fluid results in convection of the heat from the bottom to the top, due to the decrease in the density of the heated fluid; this causes it to rise relative to more dense unheated material. The reciprocal of the density of a substance is called its specific volume, a term sometimes used in thermodynamics. Density is an intensive property in that increasing the amount of a substance does not increase its density. In a well-known but apocryphal tale, Archimedes was given the task of determining whether King Hiero's goldsmith was embezzling gold during the manufacture of a golden wreath dedicated to the gods and replacing it with another, cheaper alloy.
Archimedes knew that the irregularly shaped wreath could be crushed into a cube whose volume could be calculated and compared with the mass. Baffled, Archimedes is said to have taken an immersion bath and observed from the rise of the water upon entering that he could calculate the volume of the gold wreath through the displacement of the water. Upon this discovery, he leapt from his bath and ran naked through the streets shouting, "Eureka! Eureka!". As a result, the term "eureka" entered common parlance and is used today to indicate a moment of enlightenment; the story first appeared in written form in Vitruvius' books of architecture, two centuries after it took place. Some scholars have doubted the accuracy of this tale, saying among other things that the method would have required precise measurements that would have been difficult to make at the time. From the equation for density, mass density has units of mass divided by volume; as there are many units of mass and volume covering many different magnitudes there are a large number of units for mass density in use.
The SI unit of kilogram per cubic metre and the cgs unit of gram per cubic centimetre are the most used units for density. One g/cm3 is equal to one thousand kg/m3. One cubic centimetre is equal to one millilitre. In industry, other larger or smaller units of mass and or volume are more practical and US customary units may be used. See below for a list of some of the most common units of density. A number of techniques as well as standards exist for the measurement of density of materials; such techniques include the use of a hydrometer, Hydrostatic balance, immersed body method, air comparison pycnometer, oscillating densitometer, as well as pour and tap. However, each individual method or technique measures different types of density, therefore it is necessary to have an understanding of the type of density being measured as well as the type of material in question; the density at all points of a homogeneous object equals its total mass divided by its total volume. The mass is measured with a scale or balance.
To determine the density of a liquid or a gas, a hydrometer, a dasymeter or a Coriolis flow meter may be used, respectively. Hydrostatic weighing uses the displacement of water due to a submerged object to determine the density of the object. If the body is not homogeneous its density varies between different regions of the object. In that case the density around any given location is determined by calculating the density of a small volume around that location. In the limit of an infinitesimal volume the density of an inhomogeneous object at a point becomes: ρ = d m / d V, where d V is an elementary volume at position r; the mass of the body t
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. According to radiometric dating and other sources of evidence, Earth formed over 4.5 billion years ago. Earth's gravity interacts with other objects in space the Sun and the Moon, Earth's only natural satellite. Earth revolves around the Sun in a period known as an Earth year. During this time, Earth rotates about its axis about 366.26 times. Earth's axis of rotation is tilted with respect to its orbital plane; the gravitational interaction between Earth and the Moon causes ocean tides, stabilizes Earth's orientation on its axis, slows its rotation. Earth is the largest of the four terrestrial planets. Earth's lithosphere is divided into several rigid tectonic plates that migrate across the surface over periods of many millions of years. About 71% of Earth's surface is covered with water by oceans; the remaining 29% is land consisting of continents and islands that together have many lakes and other sources of water that contribute to the hydrosphere.
The majority of Earth's polar regions are covered in ice, including the Antarctic ice sheet and the sea ice of the Arctic ice pack. Earth's interior remains active with a solid iron inner core, a liquid outer core that generates the Earth's magnetic field, a convecting mantle that drives plate tectonics. Within the first billion years of Earth's history, life appeared in the oceans and began to affect the Earth's atmosphere and surface, leading to the proliferation of aerobic and anaerobic organisms; some geological evidence indicates. Since the combination of Earth's distance from the Sun, physical properties, geological history have allowed life to evolve and thrive. In the history of the Earth, biodiversity has gone through long periods of expansion punctuated by mass extinction events. Over 99% of all species that lived on Earth are extinct. Estimates of the number of species on Earth today vary widely. Over 7.6 billion humans live on Earth and depend on its biosphere and natural resources for their survival.
Humans have developed diverse cultures. The modern English word Earth developed from a wide variety of Middle English forms, which derived from an Old English noun most spelled eorðe, it has cognates in every Germanic language, their proto-Germanic root has been reconstructed as *erþō. In its earliest appearances, eorðe was being used to translate the many senses of Latin terra and Greek γῆ: the ground, its soil, dry land, the human world, the surface of the world, the globe itself; as with Terra and Gaia, Earth was a personified goddess in Germanic paganism: the Angles were listed by Tacitus as among the devotees of Nerthus, Norse mythology included Jörð, a giantess given as the mother of Thor. Earth was written in lowercase, from early Middle English, its definite sense as "the globe" was expressed as the earth. By Early Modern English, many nouns were capitalized, the earth became the Earth when referenced along with other heavenly bodies. More the name is sometimes given as Earth, by analogy with the names of the other planets.
House styles now vary: Oxford spelling recognizes the lowercase form as the most common, with the capitalized form an acceptable variant. Another convention capitalizes "Earth" when appearing as a name but writes it in lowercase when preceded by the, it always appears in lowercase in colloquial expressions such as "what on earth are you doing?" The oldest material found in the Solar System is dated to 4.5672±0.0006 billion years ago. By 4.54±0.04 Bya the primordial Earth had formed. The bodies in the Solar System evolved with the Sun. In theory, a solar nebula partitions a volume out of a molecular cloud by gravitational collapse, which begins to spin and flatten into a circumstellar disk, the planets grow out of that disk with the Sun. A nebula contains gas, ice grains, dust. According to nebular theory, planetesimals formed by accretion, with the primordial Earth taking 10–20 million years to form. A subject of research is the formation of some 4.53 Bya. A leading hypothesis is that it was formed by accretion from material loosed from Earth after a Mars-sized object, named Theia, hit Earth.
In this view, the mass of Theia was 10 percent of Earth, it hit Earth with a glancing blow and some of its mass merged with Earth. Between 4.1 and 3.8 Bya, numerous asteroid impacts during the Late Heavy Bombardment caused significant changes to the greater surface environment of the Moon and, by inference, to that of Earth. Earth's atmosphere and oceans were formed by volcanic outgassing. Water vapor from these sources condensed into the oceans, augmented by water and ice from asteroids and comets. In this model, atmospheric "greenhouse gases" kept the oceans from freezing when the newly forming Sun had only 70% of its current luminosity. By 3.5 Bya, Earth's magnetic field was established, which helped prevent the atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind. A crust formed; the two models that explain land mass propose either a steady growth to the present-day forms or, more a rapid growth early in Earth history followed by a long-term steady continental area. Continents formed by plate tectonics
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, with internal convective motion that generates a magnetic field via a dynamo process, it is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth. Its diameter is about 1.39 million kilometers, or 109 times that of Earth, its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth. It accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. Three quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen; the Sun is a G-type main-sequence star based on its spectral class. As such, it is informally and not accurately referred to as a yellow dwarf, it formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of matter within a region of a large molecular cloud. Most of this matter gathered in the center, whereas the rest flattened into an orbiting disk that became the Solar System; the central mass became so hot and dense that it initiated nuclear fusion in its core. It is thought that all stars form by this process.
The Sun is middle-aged. It fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, converting 4 million tons of matter into energy every second as a result; this energy, which can take between 10,000 and 170,000 years to escape from its core, is the source of the Sun's light and heat. In about 5 billion years, when hydrogen fusion in its core has diminished to the point at which the Sun is no longer in hydrostatic equilibrium, its core will undergo a marked increase in density and temperature while its outer layers expand to become a red giant, it is calculated that the Sun will become sufficiently large to engulf the current orbits of Mercury and Venus, render Earth uninhabitable. After this, it will shed its outer layers and become a dense type of cooling star known as a white dwarf, no longer produce energy by fusion, but still glow and give off heat from its previous fusion; the enormous effect of the Sun on Earth has been recognized since prehistoric times, the Sun has been regarded by some cultures as a deity.
The synodic rotation of Earth and its orbit around the Sun are the basis of solar calendars, one of, the predominant calendar in use today. The English proper name Sun may be related to south. Cognates to English sun appear in other Germanic languages, including Old Frisian sunne, Old Saxon sunna, Middle Dutch sonne, modern Dutch zon, Old High German sunna, modern German Sonne, Old Norse sunna, Gothic sunnō. All Germanic terms for the Sun stem from Proto-Germanic *sunnōn; the Latin name for the Sun, Sol, is not used in everyday English. Sol is used by planetary astronomers to refer to the duration of a solar day on another planet, such as Mars; the related word solar is the usual adjectival term used for the Sun, in terms such as solar day, solar eclipse, Solar System. A mean Earth solar day is 24 hours, whereas a mean Martian'sol' is 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35.244 seconds. The English weekday name Sunday stems from Old English and is a result of a Germanic interpretation of Latin dies solis, itself a translation of the Greek ἡμέρα ἡλίου.
The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star. The Sun has an absolute magnitude of +4.83, estimated to be brighter than about 85% of the stars in the Milky Way, most of which are red dwarfs. The Sun is heavy-element-rich, star; the formation of the Sun may have been triggered by shockwaves from more nearby supernovae. This is suggested by a high abundance of heavy elements in the Solar System, such as gold and uranium, relative to the abundances of these elements in so-called Population II, heavy-element-poor, stars; the heavy elements could most plausibly have been produced by endothermic nuclear reactions during a supernova, or by transmutation through neutron absorption within a massive second-generation star. The Sun is by far the brightest object in the Earth's sky, with an apparent magnitude of −26.74. This is about 13 billion times brighter than the next brightest star, which has an apparent magnitude of −1.46. The mean distance of the Sun's center to Earth's center is 1 astronomical unit, though the distance varies as Earth moves from perihelion in January to aphelion in July.
At this average distance, light travels from the Sun's horizon to Earth's horizon in about 8 minutes and 19 seconds, while light from the closest points of the Sun and Earth takes about two seconds less. The energy of this sunlight supports all life on Earth by photosynthesis, drives Earth's climate and weather; the Sun does not have a definite boundary, but its density decreases exponentially with increasing height above the photosphere. For the purpose of measurement, the Sun's radius is considered to be the distance from its center to the edge of the photosphere, the apparent visible surface of the Sun. By this measure, the Sun is a near-perfect sphere with an oblateness estimated at about 9 millionths, which means that its polar diameter differs from its equatorial diameter by only 10 kilometres; the tidal effect of the planets is weak and does not affect the shape of the Sun. The Sun rotates faster at its equator than at its poles; this differential rotation is caused by convective motion
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian American astrophysicist who spent his professional life in the United States. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics with William A. Fowler for "...theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars". His mathematical treatment of stellar evolution yielded many of the current theoretical models of the evolutionary stages of massive stars and black holes; the Chandrasekhar limit is named after him. Chandrasekhar worked on a wide variety of physical problems in his lifetime, contributing to the contemporary understanding of stellar structure, white dwarfs, stellar dynamics, stochastic process, radiative transfer, the quantum theory of the hydrogen anion and hydromagnetic stability, turbulence and the stability of ellipsoidal figures of equilibrium, general relativity, mathematical theory of black holes and theory of colliding gravitational waves. At the University of Cambridge, he developed a theoretical model explaining the structure of white dwarf stars that took into account the relativistic variation of mass with the velocities of electrons that comprise their degenerate matter.
He showed that the mass of a white dwarf could not exceed 1.44 times that of the Sun – the Chandrasekhar limit. Chandrasekhar revised the models of stellar dynamics first outlined by Jan Oort and others by considering the effects of fluctuating gravitational fields within the Milky Way on stars rotating about the galactic centre, his solution to this complex dynamical problem involved a set of twenty partial differential equations, describing a new quantity he termed'dynamical friction', which has the dual effects of decelerating the star and helping to stabilize clusters of stars. Chandrasekhar extended this analysis to the interstellar medium, showing that clouds of galactic gas and dust are distributed unevenly. Chandrasekhar studied at Presidency College and the University of Cambridge. A long-time professor at the University of Chicago, he did some of his studies at the Yerkes Observatory, served as editor of The Astrophysical Journal from 1952 to 1971, he was on the faculty at Chicago from 1937 until his death in 1995 at the age of 84, was the Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics.
Chandrasekhar was born on 19 October 1910 in Lahore, British India in a Tamil Hindu family, to Sitalakshmi Balakrishnan and Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyar, stationed in Lahore as Deputy Auditor General of the Northwestern Railways at the time of Chandrasekhar's birth. He had two elder sisters and Balaparvathi, three younger brothers, Vishwanathan and Ramanathan and four younger sisters, Vidya and Sundari, his paternal uncle was Nobel laureate C. V. Raman, his mother was devoted to intellectual pursuits, had translated Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House into Tamil and is credited with arousing Chandra's intellectual curiosity at an early age. The family moved from Lahore to Allahabad in 1916, settled in Madras in 1918. Chandrasekhar was tutored at home until the age of 12. In middle school his father would teach him Mathematics and Physics and his mother would teach him Tamil, he attended the Hindu High School, Madras during the years 1922–25. Subsequently, he studied at Presidency College, Madras from 1925 to 1930, writing his first paper, "The Compton Scattering and the New Statistics", in 1929 after being inspired by a lecture by Arnold Sommerfeld.
He obtained his bachelor's degree, B. Sc. in physics, in June 1930. In July 1930, Chandrasekhar was awarded a Government of India scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the University of Cambridge, where he was admitted to Trinity College, secured by R. H. Fowler with whom he communicated his first paper. During his travels to England, Chandrasekhar spent his time working out the statistical mechanics of the degenerate electron gas in white dwarf stars, providing relativistic corrections to Fowler's previous work. In his first year at Cambridge, as a research student of Fowler, Chandrasekhar spent his time calculating mean opacities and applying his results to the construction of an improved model for the limiting mass of the degenerate star. At the meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society, he met E. A. Milne. At the invitation of Max Born he spent the summer of 1931, his second year of post-graduate studies, at Born's institute at Göttingen, working on opacities, atomic absorption coefficients, model stellar photospheres.
On the advice of P. A. M. Dirac, he spent his final year of graduate studies at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, where he met Niels Bohr. After receiving a bronze medal for his work on degenerate stars, in the summer of 1933, Chandrasekhar was awarded his PhD degree at Cambridge with a thesis among his four papers on rotating self-gravitating polytropes. On 9 October, he was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College for the period 1933–1937, becoming only the second Indian to receive a Trinity Fellowship after Srinivasa Ramanujan 16 years earlier, he had been so certain of failing to obtain the fellowship that he had made arrangements to study under Milne that autumn at Oxford going to the extent of renting a flat there. During this time, Chandrasekhar became acquainted with British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington. In an infamous encounter at the Royal Astronomical Society in London in 1935, Eddington publicly ridiculed the concept of the Chandrasekhar limit. Although Eddington would be proved wrong by computers and the first positive identification of a
Adam Dziewonski
Adam Marian Dziewoński was a Polish-American geophysicist who made seminal contributions to the determination of the large-scale structure of the Earth's interior and the nature of earthquakes using seismological methods. He spent most of his career at Harvard University, where he was the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science. Dziewonski was born in Lwów, a part of Poland a part of Ukraine. After having earned a Masters from the University of Warsaw, a Doctorate of Technical Sciences from the Academy of Mines and Metallurgy, Poland Dziewonski taught at the University of Texas at Dallas for several years before settling at Harvard. In the 1960s and 1970s, Dziewonski and his collaborators laid the foundation to understanding the underlying cause of tectonic plate motions by exploring convection currents in the Earth's mantle with radial maps of seismic property variations, based on measurements of seismic waves; these studies led to the development of the Preliminary reference Earth model in collaboration with Don Anderson.
Starting in the 1980s, Dziewonski led two powerful research efforts. He extended the radial Earth models to be three-dimensional, along the way mapping and interpreting four "grand" structures; the four include two regions of higher-than-average wavespeed, inferred to be cold and sinking mantle, one under the western edge of the Americas and the other under southern Eurasia. The two other features are large-scale regions of slower-than-average wavespeed, inferred to be hot and rising superplumes, located at the bottom of the mantle under the middle of the Pacific Ocean and Africa, his other research direction systematically determined the orientation and magnitude of the deformation for most of the significant earthquakes that have been well-recorded. These results are known as the Harvard CMTs and are continued today at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory by Göran Ekström and Meredith Nettles as the Global CMT Project. Dziewonski received numerous honours and awards for his scientific achievements, among them the Gold Medal of Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture, the Harry Fielding Reid Medal of the Seismological Society of America, the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Bowie Medal of the American Geophysical Union.
In 1995 he was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 1, 2016. A. M. Dziewonski, D. L. Anderson: Preliminary reference Earth model. Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors 25, S.297–356 Dziewonski's webpage at Harvard Global Centroid Moment Tensor project
Don L. Anderson
Don Lynn Anderson was an American geophysicist who made significant contributions to the understanding of the origin, evolution and composition of Earth and other planets. An expert in numerous scientific disciplines, Anderson's work combined seismology, solid state physics and petrology to explain how the Earth works. Anderson was best known for his contributions to the understanding of the Earth's deep interior, more for the hypothesis that hotspots are the product of plate tectonics rather than narrow plumes emanating from the deep Earth. Anderson was Professor of Geophysics in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, he received numerous awards from geophysical and astronomical societies. In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious Crafoord Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences along with Adam Dziewonski; that year, Anderson received the National Medal of Science. He held honorary doctorates from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Paris, served on numerous university advisory committees, including those at Harvard, Yale, University of Chicago, University of Paris, Purdue University, Rice University.
Anderson's wide-ranging research resulted in hundreds of published papers in the fields of planetary science, mineral physics, geochemistry and the philosophy of science. He continued to publish until his death, his known textbooks, Theory of the Earth, New Theory of the Earth are regarded by colleagues as compelling syntheses of the origins of the Earth and its inner workings by one of the great geophysical authorities of our time. Born in Frederick, Maryland in 1933, Anderson moved to Baltimore, he graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he earned a Bachelor of Science in geology and geophysics in 1955. He worked in the oil industry in California and Wyoming, served in the Air Force in Massachusetts and Thule, Greenland before moving to California, where he received a Ph. D. in geophysics and mathematics at Caltech in 1962. He spent most of his subsequent academic career at Caltech's Seismological Laboratory, becoming its second longest serving director from 1967 to 1989.
He was married to Nancy Ruth Anderson, had two children, Lynn Anderson Rodriguez and Lee Weston Anderson, four granddaughters. Anderson began his scientific career while serving in the U. S. Air Force. In Greenland, he studied the properties of sea ice. Anderson was charged with determining whether the ice was strong enough to withstand the landing of heavy aircraft. In working with his colleague, Dr. Wilford Weeks, on scientific papers resulting from the research, it became clear to Anderson that he needed more education, he chose to attend Caltech in geophysics. Anderson's thesis focused on the directionally dependent, properties of the mantle, it analyzed wave propagation in layered complex media. Prior to Anderson's work, seismologists had assumed that the Earth's interior behaved like glass, was isotropic. After completing his Ph. D. in 1962, Anderson joined the faculty at Caltech and moved on to other areas of study, writing papers on the composition, physical state, origin of the Earth as well as other planets.
Much in his career, he returned to the effects of anisotropy and partial melting and the presence of fluids in the upper mantle. He and his colleagues developed methods for taking into account anisotropy and the non-elastic behavior of seismic waves to explain how the Earth works; the technical terms for the subjects of his studies are anharmonicity, anelasticity, as well as anisotrophy. In other words, the Earth is not an ideal, elastic sphere. During his more than 50-year career, Anderson published papers on the composition and origin of the Moon and Mars as well as Earth, he was a principal investigator on the Viking mission to Mars in 1971. Anderson and his collaborators investigated the relations between the behavior of mantle rock under high pressures and temperatures, phase transformations of mantle minerals, the generation of earthquakes, they contributed to the understanding of tectonic plate motions by mapping convection currents in the Earth's mantle using seismological methods. These studies led to the development of the Preliminary Reference Earth Model, which provides standard values for Earth's important properties, including seismic velocities, pressure and anisotropy as a function of planetary radius and wavelength.
PREM is now the standard reference model for the Earth. This work was cited when Anderson, along with his colleague Adam Dziewonskiof Harvard University, were awarded the Crafoord Prize in 1998 in Sweden. By taking into account the physics and thermodynamics of Earth materials under the high temperature and pressure conditions in the deep interior, Anderson developed theories that depart from mainstream scientific speculations. In particular, Anderson showed that the standard geochemical and evolutionary models for the Earth are flawed because they violate the laws of thermodynamics in ways that would make Earth behave as a perpetual motion machine. Anderson likened these models to Rudyard Kipling’s “Just-So Stories,” and pointed out that these flawed theories are perpetuated when counterveiling evidence is explained away as anomalies or paradoxes. Anderson's models are based on physics and thermodynamics as well as geophysics, stand up to observations and evidence-based tests. Anderson developed an alternative model of the mineralogi
Black hole
A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing—not particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from inside it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole; the boundary of the region from which no escape is possible is called the event horizon. Although the event horizon has an enormous effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, no locally detectable features appear to be observed. In many ways, a black hole acts like an ideal black body. Moreover, quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass; this temperature is on the order of billionths of a kelvin for black holes of stellar mass, making it impossible to observe. Objects whose gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century by John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace.
The first modern solution of general relativity that would characterize a black hole was found by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916, although its interpretation as a region of space from which nothing can escape was first published by David Finkelstein in 1958. Black holes were long considered a mathematical curiosity; the discovery of neutron stars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967 sparked interest in gravitationally collapsed compact objects as a possible astrophysical reality. Black holes of stellar mass are expected to form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. After a black hole has formed, it can continue to grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings. By absorbing other stars and merging with other black holes, supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses may form. There is general consensus. Despite its invisible interior, the presence of a black hole can be inferred through its interaction with other matter and with electromagnetic radiation such as visible light.
Matter that falls onto a black hole can form an external accretion disk heated by friction, forming some of the brightest objects in the universe. If there are other stars orbiting a black hole, their orbits can be used to determine the black hole's mass and location; such observations can be used to exclude possible alternatives such as neutron stars. In this way, astronomers have identified numerous stellar black hole candidates in binary systems, established that the radio source known as Sagittarius A*, at the core of the Milky Way galaxy, contains a supermassive black hole of about 4.3 million solar masses. On 11 February 2016, the LIGO collaboration announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves, which represented the first observation of a black hole merger; as of December 2018, eleven gravitational wave events have been observed that originated from ten merging black holes. On 10 April 2019, the first direct image of a black hole and its vicinity was published, following observations made by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017 of the supermassive black hole in Messier 87's galactic centre.
Larry Kimura, a Hawaiian language professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, named the hole Pōwehi—a Hawaiian phrase referring to an "embellished dark source of unending creation." The idea of a body so massive that light could not escape was proposed by astronomical pioneer and English clergyman John Michell in a letter published in November 1784. Michell's simplistic calculations assumed that such a body might have the same density as the Sun, concluded that such a body would form when a star's diameter exceeds the Sun's by a factor of 500, the surface escape velocity exceeds the usual speed of light. Michell noted that such supermassive but non-radiating bodies might be detectable through their gravitational effects on nearby visible bodies. Scholars of the time were excited by the proposal that giant but invisible stars might be hiding in plain view, but enthusiasm dampened when the wavelike nature of light became apparent in the early nineteenth century. If light were a wave rather than a "corpuscle", it became unclear what, if any, influence gravity would have on escaping light waves.
Modern relativity discredits Michell's notion of a light ray shooting directly from the surface of a supermassive star, being slowed down by the star's gravity and free-falling back to the star's surface. In 1915, Albert Einstein developed his theory of general relativity, having earlier shown that gravity does influence light's motion. Only a few months Karl Schwarzschild found a solution to the Einstein field equations, which describes the gravitational field of a point mass and a spherical mass. A few months after Schwarzschild, Johannes Droste, a student of Hendrik Lorentz, independently gave the same solution for the point mass and wrote more extensively about its properties; this solution had a peculiar behaviour at what is now called the Schwarzschild radius, where it became singular, meaning that some of the terms in the Einstein equations became infinite. The nature of this surface was not quite understood at the time. In 1924, Arthur Eddington showed that the singularity disappeared after a change of coordinates, although it took until 1933 for Georges Lemaître to realize that this meant the singularity at the Schwarzschild radius was a non-physical coordinate singularity.
Arthur Eddington did however comment on the possibility of a star with mass c
